The Charts stack supports line and bar charts (which can be animated in supported web browsers) as well as doughnut, area, scatterplot, pie charts, and even a meter gauge. Each type of chart comes with its own customisable options, giving you extensive control over how you want your chart displayed.
Charts stack was formally developed under the SeyDesign / Nimblehost brand. The original video made in 2012 is available to view here on YouTube. Charts received an extensive update in December 2020 to make it fully mobile responsive, to fix a few bugs and introduce a couple of new settings users had requested. Other than that, its setup is similar to before.
Consider the Charts stack a good alternative to the "heavyweight" and "does everything" charting libraries that demand complicated configuration and coding. The Charts stack is a novice-friendly stack element for RapidWeaver, which reduces the setup process of basic graphs to almost a drag-and-drop procedure. A free trial version is provided. The stack is priced in mind with students and teachers who might want to use this stack in education.
Generated charts have a "widgetised" appearance. They are small and compact. You can safely use multiple Charts on the same page, to create a more intuitive dashboard showing different datasets. Column and grid stacks are good to use for page layout and presenting Charts. Because Charts is a drag-and-drop stack, you can combine Chart stacks with other content on the same page, such as written content and pictures.
If you're looking for a stack with the sole purpose of creating line charts (with plenty of customisable options), then the LineGraph stack could be a good alternative. Likewise the CSVToTable stack is good for instances when you need to convert a CSV spreadsheet into an HTML table.
Charts stack was formally developed under the SeyDesign / Nimblehost brand. The original video made in 2012 is available to view here on YouTube. Charts received an extensive update in December 2020 to make it fully mobile responsive, to fix a few bugs and introduce a couple of new settings users had requested. Other than that, its setup is similar to before.
Consider the Charts stack a good alternative to the "heavyweight" and "does everything" charting libraries that demand complicated configuration and coding. The Charts stack is a novice-friendly stack element for RapidWeaver, which reduces the setup process of basic graphs to almost a drag-and-drop procedure. A free trial version is provided. The stack is priced in mind with students and teachers who might want to use this stack in education.
Generated charts have a "widgetised" appearance. They are small and compact. You can safely use multiple Charts on the same page, to create a more intuitive dashboard showing different datasets. Column and grid stacks are good to use for page layout and presenting Charts. Because Charts is a drag-and-drop stack, you can combine Chart stacks with other content on the same page, such as written content and pictures.
If you're looking for a stack with the sole purpose of creating line charts (with plenty of customisable options), then the LineGraph stack could be a good alternative. Likewise the CSVToTable stack is good for instances when you need to convert a CSV spreadsheet into an HTML table.
Examples
Here are some real examples of the Charts stack in use (these are not pictures of the stack). Most of these examples are also available in the downloadable project file. Try resizing your browser window to what the charts scale to fit.System requirements
Charts requires the following, before you can use the trial version or paid version.- RapidWeaver 7 or greater and Stacks 4 or greater.
- A small dataset available in CSV format. Most spreadsheet software and code editors can export in CSV format.
- A web server running PHP. The Charts stack uses PHP to convert the CSV data into JSON format, which the graphing code can plot with.
Please make use of the free trial version provided, so you can fully evaluate Charts and decide if it meets your requirements.
Setup
Please follow these instructions for using Charts in your own website:- Install the stack in the normal way. Open your Stacks Library. Search for 'charts'. Drag and drop a copy of the stack into your page.
- Add a CSV file to your website, as a resource. This is the file that contains the data you want displayed. It helps to give the CSV file a web safe file name.
- Within the settings of Charts, type the name of the RapidWeaver resource CSV file you want to use. If you placed the CSV file within a sub-directory of your Resources folder, when type the sub-directory name too, with a forward slash.
- In the stack settings for Charts, choose the type of chart you want to generate from your CSV file.
- Scrolling further down the list of settings, there are more options you can change for your chart.
- Keep previewing the webpage to see the generated chart. Animation effects may only work in a normal web browser (like Firefox, Chrome or Safari).
All settings display informational tooltips on mouseover, which explain what they do. Again the emphasis of the Charts stack is on the generation of simple charts. You'll find that charts can come in a vast range of different formats and it would be impossible to create a single stack that could generate any style of chart without code. So if you need a highly bespoke chart solution for a website, you may need to consider having a custom stack make exclusively for you.
The Meter Gauge chart type does not require a CSV file. If you prefer, you can type the minimum, maximum and current values directly within the stack settings.
