#chartbuilder

For the last month or so reporters at Quartz have been building charts with the bleeding edge version of Chartbuilder. Have you noticed? Didn't think so.

Last night I was able to merge these changes into the master branch—it includes some long long long outstanding pull requests and bug fixes.

You can try it out using the hosted version of Chartbuilder, but as always, Chartbuilder really sings only after you customize it and host it yourself.

The version number is 0.6 as I still can't get myself to bump it to 1.0 until it has proper documentation, a complete suite of unit tests, a less-than-utilitarian interface and fewer situations where the whole thing breaks down.

I hope you find these changes helpful. As you come across bugs or desire more functionality please let me know by submitting them on github or by email or twitter or bike messenger. Better yet, take a stab at fixing it yourself or any of the other open issues, currently there are 34 waiting to be fixed.

Here are the ones that were just closed:

Bug Fixes:

Prevent series colors from changing when the type of series is changed

Prevent the plague of the skinny columns

Strange behavior with titles of bargrids

Auto title a chart with only one series works again

Enhancements:

the input accepts numbers that have $ £ € or % on them

the input accepts numbers with your regions decimal and thousands separator i.e 1,300.10 is valid on the US localed machines and 1'3000,10 is valid on France localed machines (thanks Parker Shelton)

the input accepts excel error cells e.g. #N/A (and plots them as blanks)

there are lots more semicolons in the code

the automatic date axis format is much much better (thanks Parker Shelton)

you can take a regular date series and format it as quarters

Up to 10 y-axis ticks by default

font loading to support https (thanks to Imran Nathani)

completely integrate Bower and include installation instructions for using it. (thanks to Alan Palazzolo)

the HTML table output uses the number formats of a user's locale

So, David Yanofsky over at The Atlantic's Quartz has just released the awesome tool they use to quickly generate charts within their editorial side (in other words, no code required). 

The tool is amazing, simple and easy to use. Basically everything you'd want for a finance- or numbers-focused newsroom. But I have to wonder, if you're working in WordPress (like Quartz does), then why not integrate it into the actual WordPress workflow? 

Seems to me like it would make things a lot easier.

So, I put in a few hours and took the first step, getting the Chartbuilder tool working within WordPress.

I'm not going to call this a huge deal, because it isn't. They did a great job of making the tool very portable and simple, it was just a matter of dropping the code into a WordPress menu page.

The biggest problem was just altering the Javascript to work within WordPress's no-conflict rules for Javascript (aside: no matter where you're building, using the `$` shortcut for jQuery is sort of bad form). I probably didn't even do that as effectively as it could be done. 

All that said, it's the first step towards building it into the editorial workflow of a WordPress website. The next step is to make the whole process accessible from the Add New/Edit Post area. Then to automatically save the items in the WordPress media area. Then to have them insert into the post as soon as you've finished creating them. 

After that we could build out a method to save the form states in options or post meta-data and give users the ability to insert a form and then go back and edit it.