The official Crazy Egg Plugin for Joomla. The easiest, free way to add your Crazy Egg tracking script to your Joomla site
For testing the plug-in, create an account on Joomla.org and install the actual version from zip-archive by following the instructions in Crazy Egg Help Center
The plug-in is pretty simple. In admin panel, its UI consists of:
- Description in header
- Account Number input field
- Crazy Egg logo and references
Given the account number, the plug-in builds a URL of the Crazy Egg tracking script and injects it into all pages of the website.
The main job of the plug-in is to insert Crazy Egg tracking script into the customer's website.
Currently it inserts the following HTML (for account number 00000011):
<script src="//script.crazyegg.com/pages/scripts/0000/0011.js" async=""></script>By convention, account number is split into 2 quartets used as the last pieces of the file path.
It is injected at the end of the <head> section. The script has "async" attribute as recommended by Crazy Egg.
In order to test local version of the plug-in, pack it into a zip-archive (as described in "Build" section below). Install it on Joomla website by uploading the archive.
To verify that plug-in is working correctly, it's enough to enter any valid account number in the input field (e.g. 00000011). Then go to any non-admin page (e.g. site homepage), open Dev Tools => Elements tab, and search for "crazyegg" substring. It should reveal the script tag injected into the page with proper URL. It means plug-in is working fine! There's no need to check if data is actually tracked - it's job of the main Crazy Egg app.
With each set of changes, you have to uninstall the plug-in and repeat the process from the beginning.
To learn more about requirements and features of Joomla plug-ins, refer to their documentation
Here we can only briefly describe the purpose of every file in the plug-in.
Standard GNU license file required in every Joomla plug-in.
To be honest, I have no idea about the purpose of this file. Maybe it's there just for historical reasons and could be removed. TODO: find it out and update this section
Main manifest file. It contains plug-in metadata as well as describes its UI on the admin page.
Its <config> section contains fields displayed on the admin page (Account Number input).
Main logic of the plug-in. It follows default structure for all Joomla plug-ins.
The file is executed on each page load (including admin pages) and inserts Crazy Egg tracking script on the page.
Custom logic is kept in the onBeforeCompileHead() hook. It is executed, as seen from its name, before page's <head> section is compiled.
The function checks if actual page is not admin page to avoid inserting script and tracking extra page views and clicks of website maintainers.
Then it checks account number setting, and if all good, inserts tracking script with required URL to the page.
2 language files required for Joomla plug-in. They contain a few tokens used in other plug-in files and by Joomla system during installation (sys.ini file)
Custom form field containing Crazy Egg logo, plug-in description and references. It is used to insert custom HTML code
into the plug-in UI on the admin page. It's referenced from crazyegg.xml manifest as a custom form field: <field name="spacer_info" ...
To build changed files into a final ZIP-archive run the following command:
zip -r crazyegg-joomla-plugin.zip plugin
or do the same manually: pack plugin folder (including the folder itself) into the zip-archive with
"crazyegg-joomla-plugin.zip" name (the name is important since it's used in the public URL for installing the plug-in).
Don't forget to update version specified in manifest (XML file) and crazyegg.php
In Crazy Egg app we use absolute URL to the zip-archive with plug-in: https://github.com/CrazyEggInc/crazyegg-joomla-plugin/raw/master/crazyegg-joomla-plugin.zip So any updates to the archive should not require any updates in-app, unless the URL of the file changes.
Usually, any breaking changes should be avoided, because we can't force all customers to re-install the plug-in. There will always be some people using old versions of the plug-in, and we need to make sure they also work (maybe just not as efficiently as new versions).
We have similar plug-ins for other platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Google Tag Manager. They are all quite different, but ideally we should aim to follow the same UI and functionality within all Crazy Egg plug-ins in order to remain consistent. When changing this Joomla plug-in, consider making the same changes to all other plug-ins - and vice versa.