Can't get Piwik to work on my SMF forum

I have an SMF forum that’s set up in a subfolder on my existing domain, called smf and the domain name is pointed at that folder.

In this folder I made a new folder named “analytics”, and uploaded all of the Piwik files in there.

When I enter my domain name in my browser followed by /analytics there’s a moment wait, and I’m redirected to a SMF url (index.php?pretty;board=analytics.0&pretty;board=analytics.0), so I can’t get to the Piwik installation.

Would anybody have a clue what’s going wrong here?

Hey Dwevvie,
I’m not familiar with SMF forums, but what you are exeriencing looks like the result of an URI rewrite function.
The forum will try to resolve any addresses in its realm and break them down into internal parameters -
this is often done to have forum thread links which resemble the threads name (as its done in this forum right here, too: the link is https://forum.matomo.org/t/cant-get-piwik-to-work-on-my-smf-forum/26817 ).
When such a link get visited, the rewrite will weed out the really relevant bit (in our case here, thats most likely the 26817 parameter) and drop the rest of the link.
This will fail if you try to access any URI that is not matching the expected pattern, which is what is happening to you.
The possible solution is to edit the .htaccess file in your forums folder to exclude the “analytics” folder from the rewrite procedure.
Hope this helps :slight_smile:

1 Like

To extend @MrSnuts answer:

I’d recommend you to install Piwik on an subdomain instead of an subfolder if it is easily possible, as you can avoid those problems this way.

@ Richard and Lokas: thanks for the help!

Your comments made me think even harder and at some point I didn’t just mydomain.xxx/analytics but mydomain.xxx/analytics/install.php and that worked, so I’m a happy camper.

In case there are other Mac users here: I got a few errors about missing files, they were all files starting with a period (in standard mode invisible on a Mac). I made the files visible, but still no dice with Transmit (FTP app), even in Binary mode. Switched to Fetch (another FTP app) and that did the job.

A friend later suggested that I could have removed the periods before transferring, and adding them again afterwards. Guess that’s the better option if you just work with Transmit… :wink: