Fun with Google ChartsFiled Under: plugins
A few days ago Google released their Charting API which provides a relatively easy method for producing charts on the fly. Over the past few days I have been producing a WordPress plugin that uses this API to make and save charts.
This plugin is in the early stages of development but It does work, in some cases very well, in others not so well. I probably won’t be able to do much more on it until next weekend and so I thought I would let you all have a look, and tell me if I am on the right lines, and what doesn’t work the way you would expect.
The Google Charts API is deceptively simple to use. The complication is in figuring out what you actually want it to show. I have tried to take as much of that out of the equation.
I don’t intend this to be a power tool in any way. But as a quick and simple plugin I think it is a nice start. Let me know what you think.
Fun with Google Charts 0.1.1 Alpha
To install it just unzip into your plugins directory. Then visit GChart under the Write tab.
- Permalink
- Andrew Rickmann
- 15 Dec 2007 11:49 PM
- Comments (6)
December 17th, 2007 at 10:18 am
there is some bug, when plugin is activated, there is no tinyMCE here… and firebug full of errors… but good plugin
thats for first immpression…
i would like color chooser included, so i don’t have to search for color HEX codes, another thing is i want that chart on left side in fixed div, so when i scroll down, it stays there
also it would be great to have save feature
now i needed to edit my chart when it was already copied away from Gchart page, and it does not take that chart what i copy in the text field.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:26 am
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December 17th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Great plugin
I have to second the tinyMCE bug.
The color chooser is a nice to have feature, but beeing able to “save” an API-link would be great. However, having templates might work better in this case.
I dont like the workflow yet - creating the link, copy & paste into a post/page, going back to the API-Page if you need to change something. Implementing it into tinyMCE/plain editor would seriously speed things up.
December 17th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I have uploaded a slightly tweaked version that doesn’t update the prototype framework for any other page than the GCharts page.
I don’t know if that is what is causing the TinyMCE problem as I haven’t been able to replicate it.
Are you guys using the standard version that comes with WordPress or the advanced version?
I agree Christoph, I have a few things in mind, the first is colour profiles, so the colours can be set once and saved for future use, the second is a save chart option so the same chart can be edited without removing it from the page.
I do intend to implement a colour picker at some point but it is low on the list.
My main concern at the moment is just getting it to work the way that people would expect, for example, making sure it calculates the scales properly only shows as many axes as necessary etc.
The API provides a background colour option that I haven’t implemented yet.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Very nice, i dont want to try around to use this API from Google. so that makes it easy! Thank you very much.
December 29th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Great idea! I can think of may ways this would be helpful on my blog.