If you have been running a website for some time, you probably have a lot of data waiting to be analyzed. I’m not talking about server logs - you should already have a tool to follow these. But the data from your users, recorded in the database, this is very valuable data that you can learn from.

If you included a created_at or an updated_at column in your tables, then you’re almost done. All you have to do to analyze the data is to query your database. Then you can see how many forum messages were posted day by day since the last month. Or the progression of your demo application usage. The ideal would be to display the data in a nice line chart, and to provide navigation and filtering controls to easily browse your statistics.

You have the data, all you need is a tool to visualize it. This tool is now available as a symfony plugin. I have the pleasure to release today a plugin called sfStatsPlugin, which does exactly that. Based on a simple YAML configuration file, the plugin will take advantage of the methods from your Propel Object Model to display a nice line chart from Google Chart API or a jQuery flot. It is fully i18ned, compatible with symfony 1.0 and 1.1, and released under the MIT License, thanks to my company’s sponsoring.

If you have some data waiting to be analyzed, download the plugin and try it right away. In minutes, you will understand how your site usage is evolving, with all the precision allowed by your object model structure.

Together with all the people working at my company, we’ve been working on a French website called “Ma Génération”. It’s a generalist news/service portal, exclusively in French - and built entirely in PHP with symfony.

Please, pay us a visit at http://www.mageneration.com.

In addition to a large custom-made CMS, the site features a forum, user blogs, user galleries, a dating service and a Netvibes-like personal homepage. Under the hood, a lot of work has been done since last August, when the development started. Some of the plugins I have been contributing lately are directly related to this website.

I want to express my thanks to all the people who’ve been working on the project, and my encouragements for the work left to be done… This is just the beginning!