Liferay includes built-in support for Google Analytics, allowing administrators to make use of Google’s tool set for analyzing site traffic data. When you sign up for Google Analytics, a snippet of code is provided which needs to be added to your web pages to allow Google’s system to register the page hit. It can be a tedious process to add this code to every page on a site, especially if it’s a large site and there is a lot of user-generated content.
This problem can be solved in Liferay by putting Google’s code into a custom theme written specifically for the web site on which the portal is running. Doing this, however, requires a theme developer to make specific changes to the theme and it prevents users from using the many themes that are freely available for Liferay “out of the box.”
Because of this, support for Google Analytics has been built into Liferay, and can be turned on through a simple user interface. This allows Liferay administrators to make use of Google Analytics on a community by community basis and turn it on and off when needed.
To enable Google Analytics support, go to Site Settings in the control panel, and then select Analytics on the right. You’ll see a very simple form, pictured below.
Figure 17.6: Setting up Google Analytics for your site is very easy: sign up for the ID and then enter it into this field.
Put your Google Analytics ID (which should have been provided to you when you signed up for the service) in the field and click Save. All the pages in the community you selected will now have the Google Analytics code in them and will be tracked.
This is a fairly simple procedure, and it gives you the ability to take advantage of some great tools to help you visualize who’s coming to your site and from where. Next, we discuss some topics germane to maintaining your Liferay installation as it’s used. Let’s start with backup.