Improve Piwik's sharing capabilities: Let a user share reports

[tsteur]

I think especially in companies / organisation (see our mission statement) it is a common task to share reports within Piwik with other people. We already have email reports for that but in this issue I rather mean one time sharing of data and not regular, automated sharing of data.

For example a data analyst or a software engineer gets asked about something like Browser usage which is important to make a decision for a certain issue they are working on. Someone would log into Piwik and it would be good to be able to share report results. This is a simple use case and can be kinda achieved with screenshots etc but it's a workaround. There are often more complex questions to answer and data to analyse.

What I am particularly thinking about is having the common share button http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/share-alt/ below a report. By pressing on it a popover opens that let's me configure the exported data. There I have the following possibilities:

• I want to limit the shown data
• I want to switch to another visualization to choose the best one that visualizes my answer/question the best way or add the same report with different visualization
• I want to add any text before and after the report. Eg I want to write a summary at the end of each report and in the beginning I want to write some kind of introduction
• I want to be able to add a legend explaining metric names, report names, ...
• I want to be able to show the percentages that are usually hidden in reports and only visible on hover
• I want to be able to add a row evolution for certain rows on top of the report. Say I need to answer the browser question and for our particular question I would like to add for example a row evolution for "Chrome", "Firefox" and "Safari" over last 12 months
• I want to be able to highlight certain rows. For example in a table I want to click on Chrome, Firefox and Safari and they should be highlighted bold so it's easier to understand for people that read the report that those are the important rows. Ideally someone would also be able to annotate these rows on the right
• One should be able to add some kind of annotations in the row evolution (they would be only used for this report) to explain why/when certain things happened
• The report would show select date, website, segment (it would explain the selected segment in a human readable format)
• It should be also possible to only export the actual visualization, eg only the PIE chart without any other information
• I want to be able to save all this information to reuse it at a later time (eg as a scheduled PDF report) but not necessarily send it automated eg every week. Only want to be able to regenerate this report at some point
• etc.

In general I want to export this report as

• PDF (in V1 maybe only PDF)
• PNG / Picture
• Send as Email to someone else directly from Piwik
• HTML page

Further more in the third or fourth version of this feature:

• I want to add multiple reports (pressing share button in one report, then deciding to add different reports as well by choosing eg from a drop box or by choosing from our dashboard widget selector)
• I want to show the same report with different segments. Eg first I want to show a row evolution followed by datatable report showing all visits. Then I want to show the same data table report again but with different segment applied
• I want to see optionally via checkbox a table of contents
• I want to maybe export this as a presentation
• Have different themes specifically for email reports (eg simple themes showing only metrics etc)

In a fifth or sixth version of this feature:

• Let a user create a custom "dashboard" / "view" in Piwik based on this export. It would be some kind of dashboard but showing it more report like. This would be directly shown in the UI
• If a user is also using the Piwik Mobile app on a phone it would be nice to send it directly to the phone.

I think in general sharing is quite common but maybe under estimated task in Piwik. We should also work on print version of Piwik see #9347, share dashboards #6964 , export dashboards as PDF #5101

We could maybe reuse PDF reports for this feature, maybe not. That's rather something technical behind the scenes.