Activity Sparks

Activity Sparks is a highly customizable widget to display a “sparkline” style graph in your sidebar indicate post and/or comment activity. This plugin leverages Google’s Chart API, so does not require the PHP GDI library. Customization options include Title, size, colour, background transparency, caching period, activity granularity and period.

1. Upload activitysparks.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WordPress installation
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. The widget can now be configured and used from the Appearance -> Widgets menu

Can I use it if I don’t want to call a widget in the sidebar?

Basic template tag support was added in v0.3. The following code checks for plugin activation and renders with the default settings.

    <?php if(function_exists('activitysparks')) {
        activitysparks();   
    } ?>

To change the default settings you must pass an array of the parameters you wish to alter. These are the available parameters and valid values

• dataset = ‘posts’, ‘comments’, ‘both’ or ‘legend’
• width_px = positive integer
• height_px = positive integer
• period = 1, 7, 14, 30, etc. (number of days to group by)
• ticks = positive integer (number of periods to display)
• chma = 0 or positive integer (chart margin px)
• bkgrnd = 6 character hex value (e.g. FFFFFF) or ‘NONE’ for transparency
• posts_color = 6 character hex value (e.g 4D89F9)
• comments_color = 6 character hex value (e.g FF9900)

An example of how to implement parameters is as follows:

    <?php if(function_exists('activitysparks')) {
        activitysparks(array('dataset'=>'legend','width_px'=>480,bkgrnd=>'NONE'));  
    } ?>

Caching is not available for the template tag implementation.

1. 

   Example implementation (3 instances)

v0.6.1 2015-08-18

• Moved screenshot to assets folder
• Added icon PNG

v0.6 2015-08-02

• Fixed “Undefined index” error.
• Tested up to: 4.2.3

v0.5 2012-10-23

• Fixed caching issues.

v0.4.2 2012-10-05

• Fixed issues highlighted by debugging mode.

v0.4.1 2012-09-18

• Tested up to: 3.2.1

v0.4 2009-09-02

• Added optional category observance
• Fixed ticks bug

v0.3 2009-08-19

• Added color swatches to widget UI
• Added basic template tag support

v0.2 2009-08-17

• Added optional caching (90% faster)

v0.1 2009-08-14

• Initial release