This is a video of the presentation I gave at WordCamp Atlanta on January 9, 2009 about integrating Google Analytics with WordPress. I’ve made a few updates to the slides and code samples since I found out afterward it’s against Google’s terms of service to track visitors by name.
I didn’t get to attend the opening sessions of WordCamp Atlanta because the weather was horrible and we didn’t want to drive home in it in the dark last night, but I’ll be there today.
If you didn’t buy a ticket, the good news is due to the weather the organizers will now accept walk-up registrations when they hadn’t planned to before. You’ll need exact change though (the registration page says they’re $55, so I’m presuming that’s how much they still cost).
Atlanta’s first Wordcamp Atlanta, one of a series of conferences focused on all things WordPress, is coming next month.
I will lead a session on advanced Google Analytics integration with WordPress. Here is a tentative set list, with the caveat that the schedule hasn’t been released yet. I don’t know what my block of time looks like, so this list may be condensed or expanded depending on how much time I have:
Advanced Segmentation: pass information from WordPress into Google Analytics custom variables so you can segment page views by author name, visitor name, category or whatever else you can think of
Conversion rates: use goals and funnels to track what percentage of your visitors are leaving comments, signing up for your email newsletter, buying your ebook, etc.
Tracking Javascript applications: add tracking to visitor interactions in your Javascript applications, or intercept Javascript events added by WordPress plug-ins and add tracking to them
Campaign integration: automagically generate campaign IDs for your posts, track them across RSS, Twitter, Facebook, email and more
Custom reporting: make sense of all this new information
This session will be oriented toward programmers with a heavy focus on coding and implementation strategies. I’m presuming you have experience with at least some of the following: WordPress theming, Google Analytics, HTML, PHP and Javascript.
Hope to see you there! WordCamp Atlanta will take place Jan. 8-9 at ATDC. Tickets are available here for $45.
Whatever your reason, it’s not a good idea to leave Drupal (or any software) running on the site if you’re not planning to constantly apply upgrades. If you don’t keep the software up-to-date, your server will be hacked. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.
The good news is it’s generally not too hard to make a cache of all the pages on the site that are available to anonymous users and replace your Drupal installation with them. Plain HTML doesn’t require a babysitter and doesn’t hog server resources like Drupal does. Here’s one way to go about mothballing your Drupal site. Don’t blame me if anything blows up, these are just suggestions to get you started.
If you read part 1 of my tutorial, you’d hopefully know how to port a simple display widget from the Wordpress 2.7 procedural widget API to the new Wordpress 2.8 object-oriented widget API. You’d also know a little about why coding widgets are better than slapping a bunch of code in your sidebar. You did read it, right? No? I’ll wait, I’ve got time.
Okay, good. The part we didn’t cover because it would have made the tutorial ridiculously long was porting configurable forms for the widget admin area. So that’s what this part is about.
