• Resolved Thomas Nielsen

    (@thniels)


    A feature I have often made good use of in other statistics systems, is a fairly simple date marker in the graph. Simply put these markers act as a visual memory jog to show when in the graph’s timeline a significant event happened, e.g. a newspaper ad, a mail-out or the boss making a speech in the canteen. It is significantly easier to spot [apparent] correlation when, for instance, a marker appears just before a peak in the graph.

    In two implementations of my own [not WordPress related] I have simply made the markers vertical lines with unique colors and line types, explained in a legend. Other methods spring to mind. The important bit is, that the graph will act as a focus element in the dashboard, directly alerting you of interesting events and their [again apparent] effect in visits.

    On the practical side, the markers are, in terms of data, indeed very simple. They simply have a date and a name. A very advanced version could have both a start- and an enddate if that makes sense in the individual case. The simple version alone could work magic.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-slimstat/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    Thank you, this sounds like a very good idea, indeed.

    How do you envision setting these markers? In the options? As a custom field associated to posts and pages?

    Camu

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    What about something like this?

    http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/annotating.html

    Camu

    Thread Starter Thomas Nielsen

    (@thniels)

    For me personally having them as simple stand-alone options would suffice. I can definitely see the point of having for instance a post or other system event spawn a marker but it will also be an altogether more complex feature to implement. No, simply being able to have a list of event/date pairs would be be enough for most situations.

    The example from Flot is spot on as one way of showing a marker. Nifty and unintrusive. Another way of doing it is like this…

    http://www.bogt.dk/filer/slimstatgraph.jpg

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    Hi there,

    I’ve started working on this feature, which will allow users to both enter a list of ‘static’ dates via WP SlimStat’s config panel, and mark given posts via a custom field, so that their pubDates will be used as markers on the chart. I got the ‘display a marker on the chart’ part working already, now I’m adding the logic to manage dates.

    Stay tuned,
    Camu

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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