During the last month we’ve focused a lot of energy on improving the Reports area of Cerb4. The couple of token reports that existed in previous builds were more on the “experimental” side than “inspired”. From the start we knew that hacking a couple more reports into the main codebase and calling it a *New Improved Reports Area!* was not a solution we were comfortable with.

A new reports area needed to take care of a few key things:

• Reports are a personalized tool. We’ve seen over the years that most everybody has a unique and specific wish list of reports they’d like to see. For this reason, it needed to be accommodating toward the idea that anybody should be able to make their own favorite report– without having to hack away at the core codebase of Cerb itself. The alternative is just not practical in any sense when we’d be dealing with the multitudes of people simultaneously trying to squeeze their reports into a system that is not built to handle it.

• We wanted to give people helpful documentation on HOW they can take advantage of the new reports functionality. We understand that a few helpful pointers can go a long way toward understanding how to accomplish tasks like creating custom reports.

• They should look good.

• Above all, we wanted to make sure that we created a healthy sample of example reports. A large example set is arguably the most useful tool we could provide to help anybody to be able to make the reports they truly want. We also recognize that not everybody wants to bother creating their own reports (Hey, we understand. You’re busy!). A good choice of prebuilt reports provides the best hope that there is already a report that can help them out today.

We’re proud to say that we think we’ve hit all 4 points.

The new generation of Cerb4 Reports allows plugins to contribute their own reports. This means that a Forums or CRM plugin’s reports won’t clutter the interface or code for people who aren’t using those tools. It also means that anyone can create their own standalone plugin containing their own report creations, and keep them separate from the core codebase. It follows that anybody could share their report plugins with others, giving them access to an easy drop-in installation method of adding new reports.

To get people started we’ve created a couple of detailed wiki articles on creating reports. “Creating a Cerb4 Report Plugin” goes through all the details on how to create a plugin with a basic report. “Adding a Chart to Your Report” is a tutorial on adding a chart to your reports.

The new reports use a more modern charts system from the Yahoo UI library. They look cleaner, they stretch and adjust to the size of the browser window dynamically, and they are much easier to build. Oh, and we definitely think they look good!

As for examples, we poured through the history of forums posts and suggestions to help decide on a list of reports to make available initially. Here’s what the list looks like as of today:

• Group Rosters
• Group Replies By Date
• Top 100 Shared Sender Domains
• Top 100 Spam/Nonspam Words (Explicit Content)
• Top 100 Spam/Nonspam Senders
• Top 100 Spam/Nonspam Domains
• Created Tickets By Group
• Open Tickets By Group
• Closed Tickets By Group
• Top Created Tickets By Contact
• Waiting Tickets By Group
• Oldest Open Tickets By Group
• Worker Replies By Date
• Average Response Time
• Worker History

So check them out for yourself, and feel free to try your hand at creating your own. As usual, any feedback is appreciated.