Alley’s product development team builds smart tools to fix common problems. So we created Simplechart, an open-source project that helps anyone edit and embed interactive charts within any CMS. Simplechart addresses some of the issues we’ve noticed in other charting applications: Data and underlying Javascript libraries no longer rely on external vendors, site owners have more flexibility to create custom default configurations, and there is seamless integration between the chart editor and the CMS.
With Simplechart, an author can quickly create a dynamic chart without needing to engage a developer, designer, or data scientist. The end result is fully responsive, custom, and completely interactive to the end user.
The basics
To use Simplechart, all you need is a dataset in comma-separated value (CSV) form. You can access Simplechart from the CMS admin screen and an iframed application will appear where you can paste or manually enter your data. You can then preview the results in different chart types, such as bar, pie, or linear, and choose the type of chart based on how you want to display your data. Customizable options include responsive breakpoints, data display formatting, and more. Product owners can also apply custom default options to create, for example, a consistent color palette across all charts on a particular site.
Pie Chart
In this example, we’re using a pie chart to show the geographic distribution of Alley team members. As you can see here, most of our team members reside in New York, near our NYC headquarters, but we also have a strong contingents in Vermont and Pennsylvania.
Bar Chart
After taking an informal survey of 25 Alley team members, we discovered that 3 team members own both dogs and cats, 7 team members own only dogs, 6 team members have cats-only homes, 8 team members have no pets, and 1 team member is a proud lizard parent.
Line Chart
This line chart example looks at the populations of New England states using census data from 1960-2010.
You can see Simplechart in action on a few sites already. For example, the Brookings Institution has been using Simplechart since their August launch to showcase data like the breakdown of party parliamentary seats in the 2011 Moroccan election.
Under the hood
Our initial prototyping for Simplechart was written in Angular.js. It was a promising start but became weighed down by the complexity that framework imposes. Ultimately, we chose to rewrite from the ground up in React/Redux. This framework’s “single source of truth” model has been a much better fit with the application, and React makes it possible to use the same component to display the chart while you’re editing it as when it’s embedded in a frontend template.
There is a Simplechart plugin available for WordPress and WordPress.com VIP sites right now, but it is designed to be compatible with any CMS. It is a free and open-source project and welcomes pull requests here.
Alley is committed to amplifying the unique voices, experiences, and career advancement of women, black, indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities. It is our responsibility to address the shortcomings in the technology industry so we can begin to include and diversify not only our employee base, but also the communities we invest
2020 was certainly not anyone’s favorite year. The way many of us live and work changed totally, and that was no different for us here at Alley. We usually take this time to share some of our successes and exciting announcements for the year, but instead we’ll be looking back at some ways we, and our clients, tried to make the world a little better in 2020.
You’ve heard Alley is a company committed to building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace, and are wondering what actions we’ve taken. Over the past year we have focused on supporting equity at all intersections and improving team member learning and development as part of a long-term sustainability plan to embed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) efforts in all areas of Alley’s business.
Decoupled WordPress may sound like a buzzword, but this architectural pattern has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Determining whether it’s the right choice can be a challenge, though, even for seasoned technologists and product managers. In this Alley Session, we’ll examine the growing landscape of decoupled WordPress strategies, focusing on how each
The changing landscape of news media has sparked innovations in platform development, subscription models, community engagement strategies and more. The pioneers of this movement are reporters and ambitious teams of talented writers who are ready to jump out from under legacy media limits and experiment in new ways with subscriptions and relationships with their readers.
Design studios bring people with varied skill sets together to solve creative problems such as identifying compelling graphics, homepage layouts, and establishing brand identity systems. Traditional brainstorms can often be ineffective, favoring the loudest or most popular voices in the room. Design studios are structured in a way that encourages the participation and the creativity