Creating a widget

To generate a widget, you can use the Rails generator that Chameleon provides:

rails g chameleon:widget NAME TYPE

to generate a widget within "app/widgets". For example, if you want to generate a widget that exposes the amount of users you have in your app currently:

rails g chameleon:widget users number_and_secondary

This will generate something similar to the following in "app/widgets/users_widget.rb":

widget :users do
  key "3638c90ec12d5a59061ad7b78afcbd050e50b621"
  type "number_and_secondary"
  data do
  end
end

To implement your widget, you simply need to alter it to return the required data - for a "number_and_secondary" type of widget, it requires a hash containing a :value, and optionally, a :previous value to compare it to (such as user count as of yesterday, for example):

widget :users do
  key "3618c90ec02d5a57061ad7b78afcbb050e50b608"
  type "number_and_secondary"
  data do
    {
      :value => User.count,
      :previous => User.count(:conditions => "created_at < '#{1.day.ago.to_s(:db)}'")
    }
  end
end

You can then point Geckoboard at your widget, http://myapp/widgets/users?key=3618c90ec02d5a57061ad7b78afcbb050e50b608, and Geckoboard will then show the current user count, as well as the percentage difference compared to a day ago.

To read more about configuring widgets, click here.

To read more about the different widget types, click here.