From the webpage:
The CTools are a Webdetails Open Source project composed by a collection of Pentaho plugins. Its purpose is to streamline the implementation and design process, expanding even further the range of possibilities of Pentaho Dashboards. This page represents our effort to keep you up to date with the our latest developments. Have fun, dazzle your clients and build a “masterpiece of a Dashboard”.
Tools include:
CCC: Community Charting Components (CCC) is a charting library on top of Protovis, a very powerful free and open-source visualization toolkit.
CBF: Focused on a multi-project/ multi-environment scenario, the Community Build Framework (CBF) is the way to setup and deploy Pentaho based applications.
CDA: Community Data Access (CDA) is a Pentaho plugin designed for accessing data with great flexibility. Born for overcoming some cons of the older implementation, CDA allows you to access any of the various Pentaho data sources and:
- join different datasources just by editing an XML file
- cache queries providing a great boost in performance.
- deliver data in different formats (csv, xls, etc.) through the Pentaho User
CDE: The Community Dashboard Editor (CDE) is the outcome of real-world needs: It was born to greatly simplify the creation, edition and rendering of dashboards.
CDF: Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) is a project that allows you to create friendly, powerful, fully featured dashboards on top of the Pentaho BI server. Former Pentaho dashboards had several drawbacks from a developer’s point of view. The developing process was awkward, it required know-how of web technologies and programming languages, and basically it was time-consuming. CDF emerged as a need for a framework that overcame all those difficulties. The final result is a powerful framework featuring the following:
- It is based on Open Source technologies.
- It separates logic (JavaScript) of the presentation (HTML, CSS)
- It features a life cycle with components interacting with each other
- It uses AJAX
- It is extensible, which gives the users a high level of customization: . Advanced users can extend the library of components.
- They also can insert their own snippets of JavaScript and jQuery code.
CST: Community Startup Tabs (CST) represents the easiest way to define and implement the Pentaho startup tabs depending on the user that logs into the PUC. Ranging from a single institutional page to a list of dashboards or reports among other contents, the tabs that each Pentaho user uses to open after loging into the PUC vary depending on the user preferences, or his/her role in the company. Then, why let Pentaho open always the same home page for everyone? The list of tabs to be opened automatically right after the login can be different depending on the user thanks to CST. Community Startup Tabs (CST) is a plugin with the following features:
- it allows you to define diferent startup tabs for each user that logs into the PUC. .it is easy to configure.
- it allows to define startup tabs based on user names or user roles.
- for the definition of the startup tabs it allows you to specify user names or roles using regular expressions.
The trick to dashboards (as opposed to some, nameless, applications) is to deliver obviously useful options and information to users.