Hi all,
What Now?
Today I put live a few small improvements:
- You can now delete non-live revisions of pages in the CMS. This can be handy, for example, if you've been experimenting with a new revision of a page but want to throw it away and try again based on the current live revision. You will find the Delete buttons in the Revisions tab.
- I've improved the print view of pages considerably - you can try this from a print preview of any page and hopefully it looks good. Though please do point me to any URLs where it messes up and I'll take a look.
- Fixed the bug with some layout slots not showing up for some people. (see other thread on the forums)
- Tweaked the HTML template for sites to get rid of an Accessibility error/warning that had been newly flagged.
- Added a help page about cookies and analytics into the documentation.
What Next?
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with the cookies/analytics. My first thought was that I should provide an option to add a cookie consent widget to Voice sites for those sites wanting to use Google Analytics or similar.
But then I thought - maybe it'd be better to just make the Voice built-in stats work much better, and provide more useful data, while still not requiring cookies.
So this is sort of where I'm heading at the moment - a revamp of the site stats so that they:
- Ignore spam bots completely (track using Javascript not the web server logs) to get more accurate page stats.
- Collect useful info about visitors (country, browser, screen size, referrer) - but not the myriad of complex options that Google Analytics and others provide.
- Have a nice intuitive and accessible interface to view the stats.
- Not require an extra login (as you do for third party services)
To that end I have been having a hunt around for possible packages and came across the curiously named GoatCounter. This could fit the bill really well and could be wrapped by e-voice without requiring extra logins. There's a demo of how the stats might look here, should anyone want a look.
I would appreciate feedback on this. Is an improvements to the stats something people would like? Or are there other more pressing things you would rather see worked on?
Other things worth considering:
- Improved default privacy policies and accessibility statements so groups don't need to write their own.
- Documentation improvements and updates (new screenshots for a start, now that the admin pages are updated!)
- Anything on the big To Do List!
Thanks!
Joe
Hi Joe,
Thanks for the update.
1. I never realised that there was an actual published "To-Do List", so seeing that was great. Thanks for putting it together.
2. In the Discussion Forum there are 3 threads: Bug Reports, General Support, and New Features & Announcements. Is there a way for you to indicate that where a system bug has been identified that it has been closed down - or its removal from the list so that only live reported bugs are shown? Can I also suggest a fourth thread: Suggested enhancements - that could link into your To-Do-List if you think that the proposed enhancement is worthy of consideration.
3. In terms of stats it would be nice to know how many hits a website gets. But this may be distorted where it has a Members' Area. With members accessing the website on a regular basis to log into their area, how easy would it be to filter out non-member from member activity on a site? Personally, I think that there are other areas from your To-Do-List that probably warrant your consideration, although there will be other site admins that would probably be thrilled at having better stats for reporting purposes. I'm not fussed either way, if the GoatCounter software is relatively easy to incorporate into Voice then perhaps you should go for it.
4. Following recent issues regarding page layouts I was wondering whether we go about creating new pages without first considering their layout. When I am creating a new page the first question for me is how do I want my page to look: single column or multiple columns. At the moment, it is only after the content has been created and saved that I turn my attention onto the layout. If the layout and the position of the content page were the first question asked then the logical step would be to swop the edit and layout tabs around. I don't know how feasible this would be, but it would be the logical approach.
Regards
Alan
I take your point about Edit and Layout. It does seem slightly odd in the current ordering.
Thanks Joe.
Looking at the current reporting analytics - how would I get a list of top 10 pages viewed by website visitors? I can see Pages URL top 10 - but i think this includes those visited / looked at by web editors? We would want to report on the top / most popular pages. (Sorry if I have missed something!)
We would definitely be keen to have a cookie consent widget available - is this a relatively quick job?
But appreciate others might prefer improvements to the existing reporting.
Thanks
Sue
Hi Sue,
On the cookie thing - why do you want a widget - is it because you want to use Google Analytics or similar? I'm just trying to understand the requirement. It's likely that you are representative of a reasonable proportion of Voice users so it would be interesting to understand.
As for the existing web stats - no we don't make any distinction between views by the public and views by website editors. And, while we try to filter out bots, a lot of the hits will also come from them. (which is why I was looking at a better solution that would exclude all the bots completely!)
Thanks
Joe
Thanks Joe!
Have responded via Voice online forum and emails.
Catch up soon I hope!
Sue
I was wondering if it were possible to have a "Number of visitors currently online" report that could be put the websites
Have you been spying on me? :-)
I've been working on some real-time GDPR-compliant cookie-free analytics for all Voice websites, which I should be able to put live pretty soon.
While it won't quite show a number of visitors currently viewing the site, it will come pretty close, as you can refresh and see exactly what pages have been visited in the last couple of minutes.
(this is NOT an April fool!)
Thanks
Joe
We discussed changes to the photo album in the last zoom call. We have discussed this in the past in terms of feature enhancements. One thing I would be really interested in using is if the photo album became a media album, allowing video as well as still images. We keep all our videos on a YouTube channel as some of videos exceed the maximum allowed size for an asset library video, so for us being able to embed a YouTube video in either the exisiting photo album application or a new media album equivalent would be a big benefit. Currently if we have a concert where both still and video images are captured we have to put the photos in an album and the videos somewhere else.