The full v1.3.0 release notes are here.

Major New Features

True Metrics & Dimensions – this release introduces a new abstraction layer for all of OWA’s metric and dimensions that allows developers and analysts to work with them without having detailed understanding of OWA’s underlying database schema. All metrics and dimensions now have their own names – allowing you to easily mix and match them in result sets and API calls.

Result sets – metrics and dimensions are now accessed through a new API method called getResultSet. This method greatly simplifies access to metric and dimension combinations greatly simplifies how you work with data in the presentation layers.

Data Export API – OWA now has a REST based API that you can use to export data in JSON, XML, serialized PHP, and even basic HTML.

Redesigned Reporting Interface – OWA’s reporting interface got a whole new look and code face lift bringing with it HTML5 graphing/charting as well as paginated data grids.

Action Tracking – you can now track an unlimited number of custom site “action” events using the new Action Tracking functionality. Track form submissions, video plays, downloads, or any other action that users can take on your site. You can even group action events and associate labels and values.

MediaWiki Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following MediaWiki actions: Article Creation/Edits/Deletions, User Registrations, User Logins, and File Uploads. No need to do custom page tagging, OWA will instrument your Mediawiki for you.

Wordpress Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following Wordpress actions: Post Creation/Edits/Deletions, User Registrations, User Logins, New Comment, New Blog Created (WP v3.0), User Profile Edit, Password Reset, and Attachment Creations, Edits, Deletions.

The release also contains lots of new reporting metrics and dimensions, five new reports, and tons of developer features. See the release notes for more details.

Upgrading from 1.2.4 or Earlier

1.3.0 is the first release that requires PHP 5.2.x. It also contains significant database schema changes that may take a long time depending on the size of your database. These schema updates must be applied from the command line to avoid browser timeouts.

Please see 1.3.0 release notes for instructions on how to install or upgrade this release.

Also, I would like to thank everyone that was involved in this release. Whether you helped out by testing the code, troubleshooting an install, filing bug tickets, or contributing code, your efforts helped make the release happen. Thanks again and please keep contributing your ideas and time to the project.

To see what’s up next, take a look at OWA’s development roadmap.

Major New Features

True Metrics & Dimensions – this release introduces a new abstraction layer for all of OWA’s metric and dimensions that allows developers and analysts to work with them without having detailed understanding of OWA’s underlying database schema. All metrics and dimensions now have their own names – allowing you to easily mix and match them in result sets and API calls.

Result sets – metrics and dimensions are now accessed through a new API method called getResultSet. This method greatly simplifies access to metric and dimension combinations and returns a new paginatedResultSet object that will greatly simplify how you work with data in the presentation layers. Result sets can contain multiple metrics, dimensions and can be constrained by any number of constraints. Constraint support has also been enhanced to add regex and substring constraints.

Data Export API – OWA now has a REST based API that you can use to export data in JSON, XML, serialized PHP, and even basic HTML. The API utilizes user specific secret key authentication or cookie based authentication when used within a pre-authenticated OWA session.

Redesigned Reporting Interface – OWA’s reporting interface gets a whole new look and code facelift bringing with it HTML5 graphing/charting as well as paginated data grids.

Action Tracking – you can now track an unlimited number of custom site “action” events using the new Action Tracking methods. Action events can be grouped and can have associated labels and a numeric value. Action events are stored in a new fact table and its associated metrics and dimensions can be accessed through the API.

MediaWiki Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following MediaWiki actions: Article Creation/Edits/Deletion, User Registrations, User Logins, and File Uploads.

Wordpress Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following Wordpress actions: Post Creation/Edits/Deletion, User Registrations, User Logins, New Comment, New Blog Created (WP v3.0), User Profile Edit, Password Reset, and Attachment Creations, Edits, Deletion.

The release also contains lots of new reporting metrics and dimensions, five new reports, and tons of developer features. See the release notes for more details.

Upgrading from 1.2.4 or Earlier

This release requires PHP 5.2.x and contains significant database schema changes that may take a long time depending on the size of your database. These schema updates must be applied from the command line to avoid browser timeouts.

Please see 1.3.0 release notes for instructions on how to install or upgrade this release.

The effect on web analytics tools is that visits will appear to be coming “direct” when in fact they are originating from search.

Stay tuned.

This release fixes a number of bugs found in 1.2.1 so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. In addition, this release introduces new and improved event queuing features that allow OWA to scale in high traffic volume environments by queueing events for asynchronous processing at a later time.

Specific features include:

Flat File Based Event Queueing – this mode allows OWA to avoid writing to the database during a tracking session. Instead tracking events are written to a flat file where they can then be processed at a later time.

Remote Event Queueing – this mode allows OWA to post it’s tracking events to another instance of OWA running under a separate php process or even on a remote server. This allows for multi-process and multi-server configurations where OWA’s event tracking is performed by one set of resources/servers and processing/logging is done by another.

Cache Expiration – Objects in OWA’s cache will now expire after a period of time in anticipation of a few upcoming features that will make it easier to update slowly changing dimensions.

More Event Processing Filters & Hooks – it is now possible to filter entire tracking events before they are logged to the database. This allows module developers to modify OWA’s core tracking logic without needing to modify any of OWA’s core files.

To get started, just download the 1.2.2 tarball or pull the tag from our SVN repository. Be sure to read the release notes for details on how to install or upgrade from a prior version.

Overall, version 1.2.1 includes significant speed and memory usage improvements, tons of bug fixes, and some major new features including:

Domstream Recordings. OWA can now record a visitor’s mouse movements, keystrokes, and clicks as part of a “screen recording”. Think of it as a video camera that allows you to see exactly how visitors interact with your pages. Domstream Recordings are a great way to analyze the usability of your pages. It’s like having a usability lab embedded on every page.

Client-side Heatmaps. Part of a new overlay reporting framework, OWA now uses the wonders of HTML 5’s Canvas to paint heatmaps over your web pages. As part of this, the heatmap height and number of observation limits have been removed! Client-side heatmaps have been successfully tested with over 50,000 observations.

URL Parameter Filters. You can now tell OWA to strip off session based parameters from your URLs. This will help you ensure that OWA only tracks your canonical URLs.

Revamped Javascript Tracker. The Javascript tracker API has been re-factored to be much faster and easier to integrate with other Javascript. Support for tracking custom DOM events has also been added.

Filters. It is now possible for developers to filter tracking data before events are written to the database. See the wiki for more on what filter hooks are available in this release.

This version also brings significant changes to OWA’s configuration, PHP APIs, as well as directory structure so please consult the release notes for upgrade instructions.

1.2.1 includes a number of bug fixes that were found in the last release candidate so be sure to “svn up” or download the 1.2.1 tarball here.

1.2.1 includes significant speed and memory usage improvements as well as tons of bug fixes and even some major new features including:

Domstream Recordings. OWA can now record a visitor’s mouse movements, keystrokes, and clicks as part of a “screen recording” that allows you to play back the interaction just as you would a video. Domstream Recordings are a great way to analyze the usability of your pages.

Client-side Heatmaps. Part of a new overlay reporting framework, OWA now uses the wonders of HTML 5’s Canvas to paint heatmaps over your web pages. As part of this, the heatmap height and number of observation limits have been removed! Client-side heatmaps have been successfully tested with over 50,000 observations.

URL Parameter Filters. You can now tell OWA to strip off session based parameters from your URLs. This will help you ensure that OWA only tracks your canonical URLs.

Revamped Javascript Tracker. The Javascript tracker API has been re-factored to be much faster and easier to integrate with other Javascript. Support for tracking custom DOM events has also been added.

This version also brings significant changes to OWA’s configuration, PHP APIs, as well as directory structure so please consult the release notes for upgrade instructions.

This release completes a significant amount of re-factoring to the core framework code including how entities, metrics, controllers, and views work.

New Features include:

• Entity Schema Creation. OWA entities can now create their own database tables. OWA’s object-relational-mapping layer has been extended to allow entities to create, drop, and alter their own database tables. This eliminates the need for a separate schema installation facility/files. This has been done in a way where it is now possible to write data access layers for support of databases other than MySQL.
• Database Schema Updates. OWA now provides an easy way for module developers to create and apply updates the database tables that the entities in their module create. See http://wiki.openwebanalytics.com/index.php?title=Schema_Updater for more info on how Schema updates work.
• Plug-able Controller Authentication. OWA has always had plug-able authentication but prior to this release it was plugable on a global basis. Now you can define which authentication method to use on a controller by controller basis.
• Widgets. OWA now features a number of widgets that can be placed on web pages. Developers can also now create their own widgets that can be used across views and modules.
• Roles & Responsibilities. OWA now has a new user authentication scheme that helps controllers check to see if the current user’s role has the necessary capabilities in order to execute the controller’s action. OWA now defines a core set of user roles and capabilities that developers can apply to their controllers. See the wiki here for more details.
• Log Named Users. OWA will now log request from named users (including those of the host application framework) by default. You can disable this via the Settings UI. This replaces prior functionality where OWA did not log admin users by default.
• New Reports and Internal UI Design. All reports and admin screens have been resigned and re-factored. Further design improvements will be rolling out with the final 1.2 release. Also, all of OWA’s javascript functions and classes now operate under the OWA or owa_ namespaces in order to avoid conflicting with the host application’s javascripts.
• View Specific Javascript and CSS. View classes can now load their own javascript and CSS files.
• Metric Pagination. Much requested trend metrics can now page their results.
• Open Flash Charts. JPGraphs has been replaced with Open Flash Charts as the default charting package for all graphs.
• Sparklines. Javascript sparklines graphs can now be created for an trend-able metric.
• Updated Packages. Updates to Browscap, PHPmailer, PEAR Log
• Generic email View. OWA now provided a generic email view that controllers can use to send email messages
• Service Layer. OWA now has a shinny new service layer that implements a number of global framework objects and services. Some objects such as the configuration and requestContainer objects have moved here and are now accessible via coreAPI methods. Modules and services implemented via framework plugins will reside in this layer shortly.
• Form/Input Data Validations. Controllers can now validate request params and form input by calling a global validation service. Validation checks that are now built into OWA include: entityExists, required, stringMatch, entityDoesNotExist, subStringPosition, and stringLength. Developers can add additional validations as plugins.
• Compatible with Wordpress v2.8.x
• Compatible with and requires MediaWiki v1.13

Bug Fixes Include:

• Wordpress plugin now shows full url in Wordpress plugin roster screen. Thanks to Nathan.
• Gallery2 plugin now correctly logs named users. Thanks to Tom.
• Many, many other bug fixes that were lost in the migration to the new Trac.

If you are upgrading from a 1.2RC you have already had this update happen as there are no further schema updates from RC3.

To upgrade to this release just ’svn up’ or download the tarball and copy the new files over the old ones.