All widgets can be added to your dashboards or exported via a URL to embed it on any page. Most widgets in Matomo (formerly Piwik) represent a report but a widget can display anything, for example a RSS feed of your corporate news. You can also use widgets to add new content to an existing report page and to create new report pages.
To add a widget in your plugin, use the console:
$ ./console generate:widget
The command will ask for your plugin name, a widget category and the name of the widget you want to create.
You can select any existing category such as "Visitors", "Live!" or "Actions", but you can also define a new category
(for example your company name). The command will create a file in the plugins/MyPlugin/Widgets/ directory,
for example MyExampleWidget.php`.
class MyExampleWidget extends Widget
{
/**
* @var Translator
*/
private $translator;
public function __construct(Translator $translator)
{
$this->translator = $translator;
}
public static function configure(WidgetConfig $config)
{
$config->setCategoryId('About Matomo');
$config->setName('My Example Widget');
$config->setOrder(5);
}
public function render()
{
// will render template "plugins/MyPlugin/templates/getDonateForm.twig"
return $this->renderTemplate('getDonateForm', array(
'footerMessage' => $this->translator->translate('CoreHome_OnlyForSuperUserAccess')
));
}
}
In the constructor you can request any dependencies such as a translator or any other class.
The widget can be configured in the configure method. The method is static because the Matomo platform would otherwise
need to resolve all dependencies defined in the constructor for all widgets just to get a list of all existing widget
names etc. For a list of all options have a look at the WidgetConfig class reference.
The widget defined above will be rendered by calling the render() method on the class. This method could look like as simple as this:
public function render()
{
return 'Hello world!';
}
As you can see, just like in controllers, the render method should return a string.
Often the rendering will be a bit more complex and a Twig View can be used to render the actual content,
see the example above. Template files need to be put into a templates directory within your plugin. To render a Twig template,
have a look how it's done in Pages.
If a widget should not be visible by everyone, you can check for permissions to restrict its access.
To do this, you can use all the methods starting with \Piwik\Piwik::checkUser*, \Piwik\Piwik::hasUser* and
\Piwik\Piwik::isUser*, for example:
public static function configure(WidgetConfig $config)
{
// only show widget if current user has super user access
$config->setIsEnabled(\Piwik\Piwik::hasUserSuperUserAccess());
// or $config->disable();
}
public function render()
{
// it is not needed to check for permissions here again
return 'Hello world!';
}
If you want to add your widget's content to an existing page in the reporting menu, all you need to do is to define
the correct category and subcategory. As soon as a category and a subcategory is configured, the platform
will either create a new menu item in the reporting menu or reuse an existing menu item. Say you wanted to add another
widget to the existing "Visitors => Software" page, then you can do this as follows:
public static function configure(WidgetConfig $config)
{
$config->setCategoryId('General_Visitors');
$config->setSubcategoryId('DevicesDetection_Software');
$config->setOrder(10);
}
The order will define at which position of the page the widget will be shown. The lower the number, the higher up in the page the widget will be visible.
Category and subcategory IDs are usually translation keys like General_Visitors and not the actual translation
("Visitors") because Matomo is available in many different languages. The best way to find the correct IDs is to
navigate to the page you want to extend in the browser, and then look for a URL parameter category and subcategory.
Creating a new page in the reporting menu works the same way as adding content to an existing reporting page. All you need to do is to specify your own unique subcategory and / or category. If it makes sense, try to reuse one of the existing main menu items such as "Visitors", "Actions" or "Referrers". However, sometimes you want to define a whole new main menu category like this:
public static function configure(WidgetConfig $config)
{
$config->setCategoryId('Campaigns');
// this will be a new menu category in the reporting menu
$config->setSubcategoryId('AdWords');
// this will be a submenu item of the 'Campaigns' menu
}
Now other plugins can enrich the "Campaigns" menu category, they can enrich your "Adwords" page, and you can define yourself more widgets to add either more menu items and pages under "Campaigns" or more content under "Adwords".
In some rare cases you might want to add content to a reporting page but not want users to export the widget as an iframe and neither want them to add the content of this widget to a dashboard. A use case is for example a widget that lets you manage something. The widget to "Manage Goals" should be available in the reporting menu but it should not be possible to add it to a dashboard. For example the widget might not work in such a context or it doesn't make much sense to the author. You can do this as follows:
public static function configure(WidgetConfig $config)
{
$config->setIsNotWidgetizable();
}
By listening to the Widget.filterWidgets event you can remove or change
existing widgets. If you haven't worked with events before, read the Events guide. For example,
you can remove all widgets having the category General_Actions in the event callback like this:
public function removeWidgetConfigs(Piwik\Widget\WidgetsList $list)
{
$list->remove($category='General_Actions'); // remove all widgets having this category
$list->remove($category='General_Actions', 'Actions_Pages'); // remove all widgets having this category and widget name
}
This allows you for example to create plugins that restrict access (ACL) to certain widgets / reports.
You can read the Widgets API reference and WidgetConfig API reference to learn everything that is possible with widgets.