Appfire has just released the FlashCharts Plugin for Clearspace. The Appfire FlashCharts Plugin introduces "data visualization" to Clearspace through stunning XML-based Flash charts and graphs. 20 different flavors of animated charts are individually controlled through 'macro parameters' and a set of associated 'xml data structures' required by each chart type.

You can get all of the details about the FlashCharts plugin and download other cool Clearspace plugins on Jivespace.

If you are looking for an easy way to display slide shows in Clearspace, we have a SlideShare Macro plugin that lets anyone display a slide show presentation in documents, blog posts, and threads.

You can use this plugin to display SlideShare presentations, but it also provides a simple example code to illustrate how you can use a plugin to display media from other online sources in Clearspace as embedded content. You can learn more about the plugin or just download the code from svn.

A quick example:

At Jive, we use our internal instance of Clearspace for everything, we call it Brewspace (hey, we're in Portland with a brew pub on every corner!) We keep all of our planning documents, weekly status updates, and more in Brewspace. We use the TaskList macro to track completion of tasks.

The TaskList macro gives authors the ability to generate and track a simple list of tasks. Each line inside the macro body is parsed as a separate task. Each task will display with a graphic button for marking the task complete. When this happens, the userid is also recorded and displayed.

The TaskListMacro applies authorization policies based on the surrounding context. In simpler terms, if you are an author for the piece of content, you can also edit the tasks.

Download or learn more about the TaskList Macro from Jivespace or visit our svn server to download the source and see how we did it!

If you are interested in writing your own plugin or macro for Clearspace, you can find plenty of information in our documentation space.

Have you ever wanted to pull a list of issues from JIRA into a document? Tim Colson, the winner of our first plugin contest, has developed an awesome JiraIssues Macro that makes it easy to interact with JIRA issues from within Clearspace using a slick Flex interface!

Because the input of the macro is an XML feed URL, you can customize it to show almost any cut of the data from Jira (only open issues on a specific project owned by a certain owner, etc.) The interface gives you the flexibility to filter, show/hide fields, and interact with the data in a variety of ways.

Download the plugin or learn more about the JiraIssues Macro Plugin with Flex.

If you are interested in writing your own plugin or macro for Clearspace, you can find plenty of information in our documentation space.