Be Able to Switch Between Time Zones

Feature Suggestions
1

One of the big bugbears I have with Piwik is that you are restricted to looking at data from one time zone.

In practice on most big websites I have, there are several different advertisers. Some are on mountain time for reporting, some on central, some are in the UK, some could be in Europe.

So when I look at my stats which are in UK time, then in reality it is nearly impossible to match up the stats, which greatly lessens the power of Piwik.

This is especially important for Goals.

At the moment I am considering nuking the entire install, because I set up the stats to be in UK time, but my main advertiser is now in Eastern time. It makes all the stats from the 30 goals I set up pretty pointless, because they are about 7 hours different.

I would have thought this would be relatively easy to fix.

Just set up a parameter in the database that sets a time up as zero, and then adds or subtracts based on how many hours ahead or behind a time zone is.

But regardless of the technicalities (and I appreciate this may be more difficult than I realise). I do think this is absolutely essential.

I should be able to log into my install and see the stats and goals from any timezone just via a dropdown, and then for example the company that reports in Eastern time I could look at with it set to Eastern time, the advertiser from the UK in Uk time etc.

And almost instantly, the stats would be 10 times more useful with exactly the same basic data.

2

Is there a way of changing the time zone after the install?

The goal stats aren’t much use to me at the moment because they essentially span two days, so I have no way of knowing which goals were on which day. (ie My stats are in UK time, but my primary advertiser is in US time. On reflection it would be more useful to have the install on that time zone so I can compare the stats in Piwik, to the stats in the advertiser account)

3

You can change the timezone in the Site Manager. If you want to recompute the archives, drop the archive_ tables and Piwik should regenerate them according to the new timezone.

4

How would you drop the archives table?

PS Thanks. I do still think it would be useful to be able to show multiple time zones just by clicking a button, flag, dropdown etc in the main interface… If you have a large site, then you have advertisers form all three American time zones for example, so it would be useful to be able to swap instantly.

And although I have changed the timezone as per your instructions, it is a little unfortunate that I cannot now see the stats in UK time as well, which is where I am based.

5

Ok. Right. After a bit more looking around I logged into PHPmyAdmin and dropped the following as you said:

DROP TABLE piwik_archive_blob_2011_01 ,
piwik_archive_blob_2011_03 ,
piwik_archive_blob_2011_04 ,
piwik_archive_blob_2011_05 ,
piwik_archive_numeric_2011_01 ,
piwik_archive_numeric_2011_03 ,
piwik_archive_numeric_2011_04 ,
piwik_archive_numeric_2011_05 ;

However, ALL of my stats seem to have now disappeared entirely.

How can I get them all to regenerate with the new timezone and reappear?

6

Ok. Little update.

The above did indeed work.

I just had to go back into Settings --> General Settings in the Piwik install afterward, and change “Allow Piwik archiving to trigger when reports are viewed from the browser” to yes.

After I did that all of the stats re-appeared set to the new timezone.

7

i have same problem, and i havent find out the best answer for my mention.
and i try follow above answer and i can do it.
So it great
thanks from Dam Bau Belly.