Live Charts and Tables on Your Site!

Plotalot makes it easy to create live charts and place them on your site. You must be able to write the SQL queries to retrieve the data you want to plot, but if you can do that, Plotalot will take the data and use the Google Charts API to produce line graphs, scatter graphs, bar charts, or pie charts of your data, with numerous formatting options.

The following live pie chart is produced using the SQL query: "Select title, hits From jos_content Order By hits Desc Limit 10". Of course this is simplistic and not really very useful, but it shows how easy it is to draw a chart with Plotalot:

Using the free component you can display any number of charts on your site, with some optional text. Using the optional Plotalot Plugin, you have much more control over page layout, and can include as many charts as you like anywhere in an article, simply by typing (plotalot id="1") anywhere in the article {using curly brackets, of course}. You can even position a transparent chart on top of another image if you want.

The pie chart above was a trivial example, but the SQL can be as complex as you like. This graph is slightly more interesting, showing live temperatures from our weather monitoring system, superimposing data for two days on one line graph. The table, below right, is also produced by Plotalot.

Some more of Plotalot's features:

• Line graphs with multiple plots
• Scatter graphs with variable dot sizes
• Horizontal or vertical stacked or grouped bar charts
• 2D or 3D pie charts with or without values
• Legend at top, bottom, left, right, or none
• Optional grid
• Titles and axis labels can be simple text or SQL queries
• Axis limits can be automatic, fixed, or SQL generated
• Chart size up to 300,000 pixels.
• Background colours, gradients, transparent, or semi-transparent
• Data value markers, line fills, range markers
• SQL can include various types of variables
• Query the local site database or any other database
• Build html formatted tables from SQL queries
• "Single items" merge seamlessly with article text (Good evening, it's 09:52 PM here and the temperature outside is 19°C)
  
• No libraries to install, just a component and a plugin
• Charting class can easily be built in to your own code to add powerful charting to your own components.

We're now building Plotalot charts into some of our own components. Here's an example of a pie chart built into Rentalot. This took about 25 lines of code:

Language Support

System Requirements

Please note that Plotalot requires PHP 5.0 or above and MySql 5.0 or above.

You can download the Plotalot component for free here.

You can find the user guide and the plugin here.