Piwik is pretty trivial to install. In the Extension Manager under "Get Extensions", type in "Piwik" and install both "piwik" and "piwikintegration". After restarting the backend, you'll see under "Web" a new module: "Pi (Statistics)". In order to use it, however, you have to do a little configuration. Don't worry - this isn't as bad as the News module.
Click on the root page and on "Template" under "Web". Select "edit the whole template" and then in the tab "Includes", from the box "Available Items", select "Piwik Integration (piwikintegration)" and save. Now you can click on the new "Pi (Statistics)" module and click on any page to see a whole BUNCH of possible data on who, how, when, from where, and why (just kidding) users have visited that page. At first it should be empty - you have to log off as the backend administrator and then surf around as some anonymous user on the front-end in order to generate some data.
The available information is pretty overwhelming: each top-level tab (Dashboard, Visitors, Actions, Reference, Goals) has a plethora of sub-tabs. The "Dashboard" is also pretty busy, with a Wordpress style collection of "widgets" that you can organise yourself.
There are two things I'd like to explore further in Piwik that go beyond the scope of the tutorial: which metrics are valuable, and how? Also, how could you simulate high traffic in order to explore meaningful theses about website visits?
The second extension I got to play around with today, mm_forum, did not offer me the relative satisfaction I had after installing Piwik. After finishing this part of the tutorial, I was left with a lot of WTF moments about the functionality and design. But first things first:
To prepare for mm_forum, you have to create a new system folder somewhere in the page-tree - let's call it "ForumData". If you need a refresher on how to do that, here it is: right-click on the "Typo3" logo at the top of the page-tree. Select "new" from the context menu and then, in the right-hand side mask, select the location where this new folder should appear. The location of the "ForumData" folder is unimportant, so I put it at the same level as the "User" folder. The mask that appears now is where you can enter the title of the new folder. Save.
Now, click on the "User" folder we created a few days ago. Click under "Web" on the "List" module. Here you should create three new user groups specifically for the forum: "ForumAdmin", "ForumUser", and "ForumMod". Save.
Finally, click on the "mm_forum" module under "Web" in order to configure it. The "assistant" will ask you to choose a data storage page - choose the "ForumData" folder - and a User storage page - choose our "User" folder. Now you'll be prompted to select a user group for "default" and "admin": choose "ForumUser" and "ForumAdmin", respectively. You'll be presented with yet another page with lots of tabs and a dropdown in the upper-right hand corner. In the dropdown are choices like "Install" (that's where we are right now), "Board Administration", "User Administration", "Templates", "Tools", "Import data", "Statistics", and "User ranks".
In the "Install" mask we can setup the configuration for user, forum, private messaging, search, file-paths, contact, and cron jobs. The "Board Administration" mask is where we set up forum categories and their message boards. Both category and message board can be configured separately, but a message board will inherit the configuration from its category by default.
For both category and message board you can enter a title, the order in which entries should appear, read-access, write-access and moderation-access. For these latter three, you select user groups - this is where the "ForumMod" user group comes into play. And does not quite work or rather, works so well, that no forum comments can *ever* be approved. Even by moderators.
In order for the forum to show up in your site, you now need to create a sub-page, "Forum", under the "Members Only" (login-form protected) page. Click on the "Page" module under "Web" in order to display the content area. Add a new content area to the "main" section and in the tabs that show up where you can pick out what type of content it should be, click on the "Plugin" tab. Select "mm_forum::Forum".
Click again on "Page" under "Web" and click on "Forum" in the page-tree. Click on the "edit" symbol for the new content. Under the "Plugin" tab, there's a section called "Plugin Options" with a tab (why another tab?) called "Forum Options" with a selection of "What to display". Select "Message Board" and save. To change the styles, click on the "Template" module under "Web", click on the "Includes" tab, and then from "Available Items" select "mm_forum Javascript Prototype", "mm_forum", "mm_forum Stylesheets" and "Page Browser" - in that order. Save.
NOW you will see on the front-end any forums you may have set up in the "mm_forum" module under "Board Administration". Playing around with the forum made a few things clear to me immediately:
I can't figure out how, if comment moderation is activated, the moderater is supposed to approve comments. I set up a user called "mod", categorised them under the "ForumMod" group, and set them up with a real email address (mine). In the "mm_forum" module under "Board Administration" I set up one of the categories to have "Moderation Access" for the "ForumMod" user group. In the front-end, when I'm logged on as a normal user, I can make forum entries and am informed that the comment is awaiting activation by moderation.
The thing is, though, that in NONE of the many places where I might, as moderator, theoretically be able to approve comments, is there a list of comments to approve. Notifications are not sent to the moderator's email (mine) either. Neither in the "mm_forum" module, the page module nor the list module for "Forum" is this a possiblity. Logged on to the front end as moderator also shows nothing different from what the normal user sees.
Another problem is that the styles for the forum suck. Trying to access the forum without having logged in does not prompt you to log in. The information provided by "Praxiswissenschaft" that the mm_forum documentation is available for download under the Extension Manager is not really true, so I'm going to have to devise a plan to fix all the stuff that's bugging me about my new forum.
But not today: the next chapter of "Praxiswissenschaft" is allll about creating your own extensions, and that's what I'm really excited about! I'll spend the rest of the day on that - tomorrow on optimising the forum - and writing about creating your own extensions with Extbase and Fluid, which is pretty cool.
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Play nicely!