I wanted a way to create a WordPress plugin that enabled me to build coffee cupping charts for my Coffee Troupe blog. I started with a PHP library called pChart pchart.sourceforge.net and modified it to make it into a WordPress plugin.

The syntax to build this sample is:
[TASTE:Yirgacheffe Ethiopia:8.5,9,8.5,8.75,9,9.5,8.5,8,7.5] – uses the cached image it builds first time
[TASTE:Yirgacheffe Ethiopia:8.5,9,8.5,8.75,9,9.5,8.5,8,7.5:rebuild] will force the image to be rebuilt every time.

The spokes of the graph are defined in the control panel so you can set your own parameters to score on.

The graph above is just a sample. I put in random scores to demonstrate the result.

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I have been reflecting on the WordCamp conference. It was amazing sitting with other WordPress fanatics for three days and looking at how others use it.

Two things surprised me at the conference. First was the Microsoft sponsorship. WordPress is all about Open Source – the opposite of what Microsoft preaches. The two Microsoft speakers were well versed in WordPress and showed how PHP, MySQL and WordPress play in a Microsoft world. Very interesting. IIS7 even has put in code to speed up PHP execution.

Second was the discussion on the FireFox browser. Like WordPress, FireFox supports plugins. I use a few basic plugins in my FireFox installation, but had no idea how powerful this capability is. My current work is exploring Cloud computing with Amazon Web Services. Amazon has written two plugins to control their services. The first is S3 Organizer for controlling S3 storage. The second is ElasticFox for controlling the EC2. Just as WordPress provides a platform to build sites and new capabilities, FireFox does the same for browsers.

I am a definite FireFox fan. While I have all of the popular browsers on my systems, my default is FireFox. The rest are for testing.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/