ChartMe! - An ExpressionEngine Chart Generating Module
Development and Programming
Hey!
I’ve decided I would like to contribute more to the community, and I really wanted to develop something, so I looked for a niche in the ExpressionEngine Module Market, and I wrote ChartMe! Please bare in mind this is my first EE module!
ChartMe! is a dynamic chart generating module for ExpressionEngine. It is easy to install and use, and I provide great support. It currently only outputs bar charts, but I’ve got others planned.
In it’s current state, it has quite limited features, but I follow the ethos of “Release early, Release often”. I have some cool stuff in the pipeline.
How to use
- Upload the chartme folder to your system/modules directory.
- Upload the chartme_images folder to your images directory.
- Upload the lang.chartme.php folder to your languages/english directory.
- Enable the module in your control panel
- Enter the EETags into your templates
Example EETag
{exp:chartme title="Scores" type="1" width="200" height="200" colors="true" chart_data="Jamie:10|Mary:6|Sam:8|Peter:4"}{/exp:chartme}Parameters
title (required)The title of the chart, displays in an <h2> tag.
type (required)The type of the chart, horizontal (0) or vertical (1)
width (require)The width of the chart (in px)
height (required)The height of the chart (in px)
colorsWhether to use different colors for the chart.
chart_data (required)The data for the chart. Comes in an array of sorts. Each bar is split by a “pipe” character (“|”), and the name of the bar and the value is separated by a colon (“:”).
For example:
Jamie:10|Sam:8|Mary:4
License
You are free to:
- Use this software for any purposes
- Redistribute this software anywhere
- Change/Modify the software
- Redistribute your changes
On the condition that:
- A copy of this license is available
- Credit is given to me
- You send me an email if you ever use it for commercial purposes
- If we ever meet up, you buy me a beer 😉
Support
Feel free to either post in this topic, PM me, or email me directly either by the contact form on my website, or at: jamie (at) jamierumbelow (dot) net
Download
You can grab the latest version here: Here
I hope you enjoy it, and please report any bugs you find.
Thanks!
Jamie
Jamie, thanks for what looks like a very nice module! I will test this in the next couple of days.
hey jamie- sounds interesting…can you post up some screen shots of the output chart? the module interface? etc?
Guess I know now why you were asking about arrays 😉 Bring on the screenshots
Ok!
Here is a little logo I put together:
http://www.jamierumbelow.net/files/logo.png
Here is a screenshot of lots of charts at once running on my localhost:
Good on you for producing this!
I have a couple of questions - if the answers to both are “yes”, the this would be a very handy tool!
- Can the ‘exp:chartme’ tag be used inside a weblog:entries tag?
- Can the ‘chart_data’ parameter take dynamic elements, for example:
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="blah" etc}
{exp:chartme title="Scores" type="1" width="200" height="200" chart_data="Jamie:{some_custom_field}|Mary:{another_custom_field}"}{/exp:chartme}
{/exp:weblog:entries}If so, you could also use the query module to get a {count} of particular entries or categories.
Both answers are yes!
One thing though, you must make sure that the value parameters inside chart_data are numbers, other wise it will throw a php error.
Thanks!
Hi.
Seems to be a nice plugin, screenshots would be very handy. Also your website is really, really slow (right now, I cannot even connect), any chance you can improve this?
Hmm.. I’ve been having some issues with my server, I’ll sort that out.
Oh, and look for a few posts up for screenshots.
is there a control panel interface?
Nope! There doesn’t need to be - everything is accessible from the EETag.
That’s an idea though - set the default settings for most of the parameters in the control panel.
kinda figured there might not be… just wanted to check though.
Couple suggestions: • It might be nice to be able to do variable height/width graphs. • Ability to specify the width of the individual bars. • Pie charts. • Automatic handling/conversion of non-numeric characters, so that errors don’t occur.
Great, thanks for the input.
I’m not quite sure what you mean…
Ok, I’ll see what I can do 😉
Coming up in the next release…
Ok, sounds good.
Thanks!
so let’s say you have a vertically stacked set of bars. the bars will be created from a dynamic set of data, so there will be a variable number of bars… could be 2, then could be more than 20 over time. what would be ideal is if you could set it up so the width of the chart was 350px, the height of a single bar was 10px, and the height of the chart was variable/expandable based on the number of bars (and spacing between bars). that way for a chart of 2 bars it would be pretty short, and would automatically get taller as more bars were added.
make sense?