Note: As Irakli comments below, Charts and Graphs module has changed in time. Please refer to http://drupal.org/node/681660. Information below may not be correct for the latest version of the module.
Displaying data with charts and graphs is a nice way to visualize numeric data. Not everybody is good with numbers, while most of the people like to see a bar chart to see the change in several values.
On sahandafutbol.com, the users get points for their correct guesses on a match day. So, I thought displaying user’s points per match day with a bar chart would be really nice.
We could use a free charting API that can work with the data provided by our custom module. But at first, I searched for a contributed module which already offers the needed functionality. I must say that, charting is a wild area in Drupal world. There are some modules for charting; but their names, dependencies and the lack of solid documentation can easily confuse anybody. There are 3 different modules named as “Chart API”, “Charts” and “Chart and Graphs”… If I ever contribute a module about charting, I will name it as “Charts API and Graphs”, because there may be a secret naming convention for this area and I don’t want to break it :)
I tried each module and in the end, I decided to use Charts and Graphs in combination with Views Charts. Our custom module is fully integrated with Views so it is easy to display any kind of information with charts. The module supports 3 different libraries. I chose the Open Flash Chart 2 API. With this opportunity, I would also like to thank to the creators of the Open Flash Chart project.
