Announcement: Piwik to focus on Reliability, Performance and Security

To our valued team and community,

Well, we have moved fast and achieved so much during the past few months. Relentlessly releasing major version after major version… We got a lot done including several major new features!

The speed of adding new features was a great showcase of how agile our small teams and the larger community are. And I’m so proud to see automated testing becoming common practice among everyone hacking on Piwik!

For the next few months until the new year we will focus on making what we have better. We will fix those rare but longstanding critical bugs, and aim to solve all Major bugs and other must-have performance and general improvements. The core team will have the vision of making the existing Piwik and all plugins very stable and risk free. This includes edge cases, general bugs but also specific performance issues for high traffic or issues with edge case data payloads.

We’ll be more pro-active and take Piwik platform to the next level of Performance, Security, Privacy & Reliability! We will prove to the world that Free/Libre Web software can be of the highest standard of quality. By focusing on quality we will make Piwik even easier to maintain and improve in the future. We are building the best open platform that will let every user liberate their data and keep full control of it.

If you have any feedback or questions, get in touch or let’s continue the discussion here.

Thank you for your trust and for liberating your data with Piwik,

Matthieu Aubry
Piwik founder

https://twitter.com/matthieuaubry

Originally posted on http://piwik.org/blog/2014/10/announcement-piwik-focus-reliability-performance-security/

Hi Matthieu,

this is great news - the slightly buggy 2.7.0 release had just caused an internal discussion on how to handle the fast Piwik development pace without explicit “stable” branches (we had settled on a “wait for two weeks and check whether they’ll push a bugfix release” compromise).
I’m looking forward to see how far you can get with test driven stability without a stable product branch.

Nikolaus

Hi Matt,

as Nikolaus, I am concerned about the quality of releases as we had problems after updating too many times. Our workflow for updating Piwik includes a “wait for some days for the bugfixes to come in” and “check the forum for all the bug reports regarding the new version”.

For recent examples, take 2.6.0 where 2.6.1 was released on the same day and 2.8.0 where we had updates .1, .2, and .3 on three consecutive days.

Have you considered using LTS branches that only receive bugfixes but no new features?

Lars

Hi,
I truly appreciate the hard work that has gone into the current more or less feature parity with Google Analytics (at least from the Client JS perspective). My Impression is that it would be worth it to push stability in a “single branch” mode for a little more.

I know very well that managing, documenting and testing more than one release branch costs a lot of precious time, but I don’t believe you will get around adding at least one more relase branch. A relase model I personally like is to be able to switch the update notification between two operation modes: One that notifies about every latest version (say, 2.9.0) and one that lags one minor relase behind (say, current latest is 2.9.0, but that mode would only suggest 2.8.4 until 2.10.0 is out and would then suggest 2.9.x, which would typicall not be a x.x.0 release). Libreoffice is doing something similar.

For the maintainer of the software that means there is a maximum of 2 separate relase branches to maintain and the “stable” one is not even always necessary many times. For the user there is still a lot of pressure to stay fairly up to date because he/she knows that there will be no more bugfix relases if he/she’s more than one minor version behind current.

Greets and don’t worry until you go into the next “Feature Offensive” or internal refactoring phase.

Nikolaus

Dear php-injection-bot, would you please refrain from posting more off-topic random characters please?

Great news!

what happened to the automatuic update process? it never seems to work and even when it reports it did work…it did not. :frowning:

Hi mlx9000, the automatic update process should work fine in Piwik (make sure you use latest Piwik version)

I truly appreciate the hard work that has gone into the current more or less feature parity with Google Analytics (at least from the Client JS perspective). My Impression is that it would be worth it to push stability in a “single branch” mode for a little more.

http://imgupp.com/img/1434586608.jpg

as Nikolaus, I am concerned about the quality of releases as we had problems after updating too many times. Our workflow for updating Piwik includes a “wait for some days for the bugfixes to come in” and “check the forum for all the bug reports regarding the new version”.

http://imgupp.com/img/1433173618.jpg