This is our latest Matomo 3 development update where we present all changes that will be shipped with Matomo 3. Learn more about the exciting projects under progress in our Matomo 3 dev update #1 and dev update #2.
The Matomo Marketplace is the place where you can discover & download plugins to enrich the functionality of your Matomo, and themes to change the look and feel of your Matomo user interface. In preparation for our Matomo 3 release we have made several improvements to the Marketplace:
- Users can now view more information for a given plugin, such as a link to an online demo, a video demo, how to obtain support from the Plugin’s developer(s), and more.
- Users can now view which plugins are compatible with the most recent Matomo version, for example view which plugins are already compatible with Matomo 3.
- Plugin developers can now 1) promote their plugin better, 2) easily define requirement(s) for their plugins using composer.json version constraints (a best practise most developers already use) and 3) developers can define which files and directories should be excluded from the publicly available plugin zip packages.
These improvements will make it easier for you to discover new Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik Analytics) plugins to achieve your goals.
Marketplace now supports different Matomo versions
You can now filter plugins by Matomo version to see only plugins that are compatible with your Matomo.
When you browse the Marketplace in the Matomo app itself, you will automatically only see plugins and updates that are compatible with your Matomo.
Better plugin preview
Plugin developers are able to display screenshots for their plugins, and now plugin developers can also specify a demo URL and a video in the “plugin.json” file. Adding a video to your plugin allows users to get a much better understanding of what your plugin does and how a theme looks.
Unified support page
In the past a developer had to define the text that was displayed on the support page. This often resulted in blank support pages or developers only showed an email address. With this new update, links and other support information are displayed in a standardised way as specified in the “support” section of the “plugin.json” file. A developer can now define links to an issue tracker, a wiki, the plugin’s source code and more.
License files
The license name on your plugin’s page is now clickable and can show the license text for your plugin. To define a license text for your plugin, create a file named LICENSE, LICENSE.md or LICENSE.txt.
FAQ and Documentation
In the past a “FAQ” tab was displayed if such a section was present in the plugin’s readme file. This was hard to understand and sometimes ended up in long readme files. Now we pick up the FAQ content from a docs/faq.md file.
For plugins developers who wish to provide a user guide(s), it is now possible to show a “documentation” tab to the plugin page by specifying a docs/index.md file.
Changelog
When you define a file named CHANGELOG, CHANGELOG.md or CHANGELOG.txt in your plugin, we will show the content of this file in a tab “Changelog” on your plugin’s page. Before it was needed to specify the content of the changelog in the readme file.
Exclude files from the plugin
If your plugin source code contains files that are not supposed to be present on a Matomo installation you can now choose to exclude files and directories from your plugin zip archive. When a user installs your plugin the excluded files won’t be there.
Migrating your plugin for Matomo 3
We recommend to all plugin developers to specify in the plugin.json file whether their plugin is compatible with Matomo 3 or not. If your plugin defines a “Changelog”, “Support” or “FAQ” section in the README.md file we recommend to migrate this to the new structure. Read more about this in the migration guide.
Until our next Matomo 3 dev update, Happy analysis!
