Why M Chart Pro?

The first time I built a Chart/Data management UI for a CMS was in the early 2009. I was working with a bunch of media and tech journalists at a company called ContentNext and part of the beat was covering mergers and acquisitions, as well the quarterly financial reports.

One of the journalists liked including charts in his articles and he was building those in external tools and then pasting them into his articles as embedded images.

The CMS they used was ExpressionEngine and I wrote a custom extension for it called Data Module. It would have been somewhat familiar to any M Chart user. It had a spreadsheet UI at the top and a chart below. If memory serves you could make line, pie, bar and column charts and that was it.

My first Chart/Data management UI (Data Module) was written for the ExpressionEngine CMS in 2009

At that time the ContentNext was owned by the Guardian Media Group based in the UK and then 2012 it was sold to another company based out of San Francisco called GigaOM.

I came with the sale to GigaOM and one of my first tasks was to rewrite the Data Module extension for WordPress. And thus the GO Datamodule plugin was born. WordPress was very different than ExpressionEngine but it did use PHP at least so I was in familiar territory there. I used the opportunity to improve the plugin quite a bit including the headline feature of it generating an Image version of the charts. The UI was somewhat similar to the one in M Chart but missing lots of improvements and streamlining that exists now. The chart type list grew a tiny bit but was still pretty basic.

Another precursor to M Chart the GO Datamodule was a rewritten version of the Expression Engine plugin for WordPress

This introduced the plugin to a much larger group of journalists though which was a great learning experience. I built and helped maintain all kinds of other plugins for GigaOM and worked with a great group of other developers. My time there was invaluable to me and it was a sad day when the whole company got the call that our investors were done and had decided to shut down the company.

That initial layoff was terrifying. I had become a new Dad with the birth of my daughter only a month before I was laid off so the fear was real and existential.

I started interviewing for new jobs immediately which as some of you know is not far off from a humiliation ritual at times and started taking contract work that reminded me why I’d stopped doing contract work and taken the job with the ContentNext in the first place. That contract work included a job where I did thousands of dollars of work for an agency in NY and was never paid for it. Fun stuff.

During that time I also sat down and decided to design and code a new Chart plugin from scratch. My goal being to use all I’d learned the previous two times to improve on the mistakes I’d made in the previous plugins and have something I could more easily maintain as well as just put something out there in the world.

It was refreshing and exciting building something from the ground up just for myself (and the world at large of course) and the results of that, M Chart, were launched it in the summer of 2015.

After being laid off I wrote M Chart from scratch and launched it in the summer of 2015

Since then I’ve been maintaining the plugin with the help from a very small number of other contributors for over a decade. The user base has grown over those many years and the features have grown with it. The current 17 chart types supported is a big bump from the original 6! There have been some painful changes along the way too of course. The switch from Highcharts to Chart.js so that the charting library used by the plugin no longer came with any onerous licensing was a good and important change but hard on existing users though the devs that maintain Chart.js have grown it into a very capable library now.

It’s been a honor and a pleasure to see so many people and organizations all across the world using M Chart; Building tools and seeing them used and appreciated by others is something that will never get old.

I did find a job shortly after launching M Chart with the company thought bought out some of the remnants of GigaOM and spent the next decade working for them and maintaining M Chart on the side after regular working hours.

Because of my limited ability to devote time to development of M Chart I’ve had to intentionally not add some features that have been requested throughout the years. Not because those features were bad ideas, but because I couldn’t devote the kind of time necessary to do those features justice.

Watching the M Chart user base grow and be used by so many different organizations and people around the world has been an honor

Now, a little over 10 years later, I find myself in a somewhat familiar situation. I’ve been laid off yet again.

Some things are different now I have two wonderful daughters to help provide for instead of just one and they’re both fully of questions and enthusiam for life.

But others are the same, I’m in the same house with the same wonderful person by my side both of which are gifts I’m very aware make me incredibly lucky.

Also like before, I’ve decide this is perhaps an opportunity to build something new, M Chart Pro.

I want to be very clear. M Chart (the free version) will continue to be supported and developed, I’ve been working on this plugin and providing it for free over a decade and that will continue to be the case.

I’ve been working on M Chart and providing it for free over a decade and that will continue to be the case

However, that support and development will continue to match my original scope for the plugin which was to provide an efficient and easy to use UI for managing datasets and displaying them as charts and nothing more.

M Chart Pro will be where I add those out of scope features as an addon to M Chart and since M Chart Pro will have a yearly subscription fee it will hopefully provide me with the financial stability to allow me to devote my time more fully to M Chart overall.

M Chart Pro will be where more complex features are added, and the subscription fees will hopefully allow me to devote more time to both plugins

For an idea of what might be in store for future versions of M Chart and M Chart Pro please take a look a look at the lists on the Future Plans page. I’d love to hear your own suggestions of things you’d like to see or problems you’d like solutions to and there’s a form on there for submitting them.

I’m also available to help you implement M Chart and M Chart Pro in more custom or particular ways if you have a need for anything like please use the Contact Form