Everything you need to ship dashboards.

Overview

Tessera turns Formidable Forms submissions into a Business Intelligence layer inside WordPress. Build dashboards, KPI trackers, client-facing reporting portals, and operational monitoring tools — without spreadsheets, exports, or external BI.

Every entry is a tile. Every dashboard is the picture.

What you can do

• Visualize: KPI cards, bar/line/area/pie/doughnut charts, leaderboards, tables, calendar heatmaps, gauges, funnels.
• Aggregate: Count, sum, average, min, max — grouped by any form field, bucketed by day/week/month.
• Combine: Join multiple Formidable forms via shared fields (intake → follow-up → resolution).
• Publish: Dashboards auto-create a public WordPress page so you don't have to paste shortcodes anywhere.
• Share: Issue revocable share links, schedule email digests, export PDFs.
• Brand: White-label dashboards with your client's name, color, and logo.

Quick Start

Get a working dashboard in under a minute.

1. Make sure Formidable Forms is active.
2. (Optional) Load demo data from Tessera → Demo Data to spin up 3 sample forms + 500 entries + 4 prebuilt dashboards.
3. Click + New Dashboard, give it a title, pick a template (or start blank).
4. Click + Add Widget, pick a type (start with KPI Card), select a form, configure metric/group/filters. Watch the live preview update on the right.
5. Click Publish. With visibility set to Public or Role-based, Tessera auto-creates a WordPress page with a shareable URL — no shortcode needed.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a container for widgets. Each dashboard has a title, a status (draft/published), visibility, and a layout of widgets.

Status

Visibility

Auto-publish

Publishing a Public or Role-based dashboard automatically creates a WordPress page. The page title syncs with the dashboard title; unpublishing or deleting the dashboard removes the page. Disable in Tessera → Settings → Publishing.

Widget types

11 widget types ship with Tessera:

Filters & metrics

Metrics

• Count entries — How many submissions match.
• Sum / Average / Min / Max of a field — Aggregate a numeric field.

Date ranges

Limit a widget to the last 7, 30, 90 days, year-to-date, last 12 months, or all time.

Field filters

For fields with few distinct values, the filter UI shows a select dropdown of actual values. For free-text fields, it shows clickable example chips.

Multi-form joins

A data source is a primary Formidable form plus zero or more joined forms. Joined forms connect via a shared field — like a Service Request intake form linking to a Follow-Up form by request ID.

Pro+ feature. Multi-form aggregation is part of the Pro plan and above.

Create one

1. Go to Tessera → Data Sources.
2. Click + New Data Source.
3. Pick the main form.
4. Add a link: pick the joined form and matching fields (e.g. request_id ↔ request_ref).
5. Set a nickname for the joined form (e.g. followup). Joined fields will be addressed as followup.outcome in widget configs.

Sharing & embeds

Three ways to share a dashboard

1. Auto-published page — Publish a Public dashboard and Tessera creates a WordPress page automatically.

2. Share link (revocable) — For private dashboards, click Share to issue a 40-character token. The resulting URL bypasses visibility and renders the dashboard in a clean, theme-free shell. Rotate or revoke anytime.

3. Shortcode — Paste anywhere:

[tessera_dashboard id="1"]
[tessera_dashboard slug="operations-overview"]

Scheduled reports

Email an HTML snapshot of a dashboard on a recurring schedule. Daily, weekly, or monthly. Pro+ feature.

1. Open a dashboard in the editor.
2. Click Schedule in the toolbar.
3. Pick cadence, add recipients, save.

PDF export

Click PDF in the dashboard editor or front-end view. Tessera bundles jsPDF + html2canvas locally — no CDN at runtime, no server roundtrip.

White-label

Replace Tessera branding with your own. Useful for agencies delivering dashboards to clients. Agency feature.

• Brand name — Shown on dashboards under the title.
• Brand color — Overrides default Tessera indigo across charts and accents.
• Brand logo — Displayed next to the dashboard title. Choose from WordPress media library.

AI Insights

Generate plain-language insights about your dashboard data with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or Groq. Multi-turn chat to ask follow-up questions. Agency feature (bring your own API key).

Free providers

• Groq — Llama 3.3 70B, ~500 tokens/sec, very generous free tier.
• Google Gemini — 15 requests/min on free tier, no credit card.

License & plans

Tessera is sold under a per-site annual license. Activate on this site in Tessera → License.

How licensing works

• Activation registers your domain against the license server.
• Tessera revalidates weekly in the background.
• Soft-fail: if the license server is unreachable, dashboards keep working for 14 days after the last successful check.
• All license-server responses are HMAC-signed so they can't be MITM'd.
• Deactivating Tessera frees the site slot.

For developers

REST API

All endpoints live under /wp-json/tessera/v1.

GET    /dashboards
POST   /dashboards
GET    /dashboards/{id}
PUT    /dashboards/{id}
DELETE /dashboards/{id}

POST   /widgets
PUT    /widgets/{id}
DELETE /widgets/{id}
GET    /widgets/{id}/data
POST   /widgets/preview
GET    /widgets/{id}/export

POST   /dashboards/{id}/share
GET    /dashboards/{id}/schedules
POST   /dashboards/{id}/insights
POST   /dashboards/{id}/chat

GET    /templates
POST   /dashboards/from-template

GET    /forms
GET    /forms/{id}/fields
GET    /forms/{id}/field-values

Hooks

Troubleshooting

Widgets show "No data"

• Verify the selected form has entries.
• Check the date range covers when those entries were submitted.
• For aggregations, the metric field must contain numeric values.

Scheduled reports never arrive

• WP-Cron must fire — site traffic triggers it, or set up a real cron job.
• Test with Send Now first. If that works, the issue is cron scheduling.
• Make sure your site can send email (many hosts require an SMTP plugin).

Anonymous visitors get "Dashboard not found"

• Check the dashboard's visibility — Private dashboards require login.
• Verify the dashboard's status is Published.