Nice Examples of Tutorials about rcharts

[timelyportfolio]

this one is similar but also quite nice, welcoming, and helpful https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Tutorial

[ramnathv]

Yes. It is a good one. I had seen it before, but did not think about it in this context. I am putting together a set of examples using rCharts and Slidify that uses the bootstrap framework. Eventually, I will have a wrapper function, that takes rCharts code and outputs a Bootstrap page, which will help users submit examples.

[timelyportfolio]

Never mind below. Most answered in #7.

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That looks very nice. I think success of this project will depend very heavily on a multitude of user generated examples. An automated, attractive tutorial for each of these would be simply amazing. How often will this update? Or will users simply, press publish, and it gets automatically generated?

Based on the picture, each chart will have a single-page tutorial generated from the .Rmd. Did you figure out a way to do a screenshot, or will each example chart be a live example?

I'll be happy to contribute. I need to work on converting some of my old d3 and lattice stuff.

Once you get lots of examples, you might need some sort of tagging or categorizing, such as bar/line/scatter/facet/boxplot/etc. or polycharts/vega/rickshaw/nvd3/etc. I'll try to think through this.

[ramnathv]

Here are some answers to your questions:

1. The examples will automatically get generated from an R file with metadata in comments. So, the chart in question was generated from the following R file. You can include multiple examples in an R file as long as you stick to the format. I have a helper script that will split the examples, parse them and render them into a bootstrap page.

   ### {title: Multi Bar Chart, lib: polychart}
   haireye = as.data.frame(HairEyeColor)
   p2 <- rPlot(Freq ~ Hair, color = "Eye", data = haireye, type = 'bar')
   p2$facet(var = 'Eye', type = 'wrap', rows = 2)
   p2$printChart('chart')
   

2. I am thinking of using gists and Google Forms for users to submit their examples. The idea is to create a gist with their example and then use Google Forms to submit it. Now that I am thinking, I might as well push the metadata to the Google Form to prevent transcription errors. So, the form will ask for title, author, library and link to gist. The helper script will use the Google Spreadsheet, and generate the example pages.

3. Automating screenshots is the tricky part. For now, the Google Form will also ask for a link to a screenshot, which users can easily upload to a site like imgur. The problem with live examples is that they need to be embedded as iFrames and that can cause quite a bit of grief.

4. Yes, I was thinking of a tag based approach for the gallery page. Two promising ideas are here and here. The second page in fact has a nice way to do continuous integration, since everything on the page is fed from a Google Spreadsheet. The first one is nice in the effects.

Thanks for your offer to help. I will use Github to maintain a list of tasks to do and ideas. So feel free to glaze over and work on anything that might be of interest to you. My task this weekend is to put everything together on rCharts, update the webpage to reflect that it is more than just PolychartJS and create a preliminary version of the examples gallery.

[ramnathv]

Another example for a useful gallery is http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/examples/. I like its simplicity and the fact that it provides the objective of each example at a glance.