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by richthegeek 4433 days ago
I am seeing an opportunity for a service that provides the following, and perhaps it already exists:

1. A unified source of dashboards/dashboard widgets

2. which accept data in one or more known and well-documented format(s)

3. which are largely configurable and themeable

4. which can be embedded as either a whole dashboard or individual widgets

This would allow that service to manage all the hard work of actually developing and maintaining the widgets (including stuff like mobile versions, fallbacks, etc...) and means I could just chuck data at a known config. Or, I could define my dashboard to go fetch that data and then have it displayed on the service's (custom branded) page.

Sure there are libraries that do parts of this, but nothing that really focuses on providing a whole-dashboard set of features and isn't quite opinionated on both how the overall dashboard should look and how each widget should behave.

But for now, I'll just keep writing all these widgets myself ... sigh.

3 comments

Check out https://telemetryapp.com -- it handles your requirements I think.
Thank you for the feedback Rich.

You can build your own widgets in Freeboard, and once completed, users can share new widgets directly with each other through GitHub. We are looking to build a marketplace of sorts as well, populated by the community, and curated for convenience.

In my case it's for a CRM / marketing dashboard, so the data is more stuff like "pageviews over time" or "sales today vs last week".

I'm fairly sure that the actual data is unimportant if the widgets and data format are sufficiently generalised.

The important parts for me are how style-able the widgets are... seems like everyone is going for these carbon-black dashboards which isn't ideal for most of where we want to show it (ie, not a statusboard on a TV)

Understood. One of the great things about freeboard is that it is open source and you can change CSS, colors or anything you want on your own.
geckoboard may be able to do all this for you
Checkout www.sqldashboards.com

Regarding your points: 1. Currently 13 charting widgets 2. Database SQL query format 3. Configurable and Themable (3 themes so far) 4. Not yet but would be nice...