Future of this Plugin?

If you read the intro for this plugin you will see that I am currently evaluating the future of this plugin. I am posting this to explain in more detail why I am doing this.

there are several issues:

1. This plugin uses the older version of GA “ga.js”
2. This plugin cannot take advantage of the changes that can be made to allow your old GA property to include demographic data
3. This plugin is not compatible with Universal Analytics “analytics.js”

In order to take advantage of any of the new GA (Universal Analytics) or even the old GA with modification to add demographic data this plugin will need to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.

One of my goals as a developer is the reduce the dependence of non-developers for my services. This might seem illogical to some, why would I want to reduce the need to the services I provide? Well, because I don’t want to do simple things, I want to do the heavy lifting and let others do the day to day stuff, like adding events to links.

This is the reason I developed the original script that eventually became this plugin. I started development of that script in 2007 back in the days of urchin.js.

Google has come a long way since 2007. In October of this year (2013) Google posted news about improvements to Google Tag Manager.

Using Google’s tag manager you can now do everything that this plugin does, and then some. Not only can you use it to install GA, but you can use it to set up events, install re-marketing code, install Adwords conversion code, along with a host of other things.

In short, Google’s Tag Manager solves my need to make others less dependent on me to get these things done. Instead of needing me to install each thing they just need me to install the Tag Manager Code and then they can do all the rest themselves, no development or code experience required.

My suggestion to anyone reading this is to dump whatever plugin(s) you’re currently using to get the job done, sign up for Tag Manager, get it installed, and become less dependent on your developer or needing separate plugins for all these coding tasks that need to be done.

I will continue to maintain this script to work as it should for those that still want to use it, for as long as the old version of GA (ga.js) is still available but…

I’m questioning the need to continue to improve this plugin and keep up with the changes in GA when there is now an existing tool does it produced by Google. No more need to keep up with the changes in GA as I’m sure that Google will keep the Tag Manager up to date with changes in their own service.