In the last chapter we learned how to send data to Piwik and that we can use any programming language we choose to do so. But the real magic comes in when we use Piwik's API to get the data back to use, analyze, and format however we want. We can do the same data manipulation inside Piwik by writing a plugin, another topic we covered, but you may have reasons you want to do this from the outside. You may want to simply display a widget from Piwik somewhere on your website to give your visitors an idea of your traffic. You may need to merge Piwik data with the inventory data for your e-commerce site to calculate when to order new products. Or you may want to do some heavy processing of the data available without bogging down the performance of your Piwik installation.
In this chapter, we will show you how to get the data back from Piwik so you can integrate it with other applications. The topics we will be covering are:
Using plugins to integrate Piwik data
Using...