I'm looking for some advice for adding d3.js charts to Wordpress.
My client has commissioned a forceSimulation - still in progress. It is currently organised as follows:
index.html
main_javascript.js
main_css.css
global_properties.js
data_file.csv
I'm totally clueless as to whether it is possible to add the chart to her Wordpress blog and if so how to do it.... Any advice would be much appreciated.
Many thanks.
For reference, here are the WordPress docs on Using JavaScript.
Making it easy for them
From past experience (though not in WordPress), I'd try to simplify the steps your client has to take to get the visualisation working well, just in case the person doing them has little technical skill.
Hence, as far as possible, I'd combine your files into one force-viz.js:
CSS rules can be inlined by using d3.style in JS on the appropriate elements.
CSV can be inlined as a JavaScript string, parsed with d3.csvParse.
global_properties.js can just be in the same JS file.
index.html is unnecessary if you use d3.select(...).append(...) to construct the DOM tree you want, and instruct your client to write—
<div id="force-viz"></div>
—where they want the chart to appear, then d3.select that in your script.
This would mean all your client has to do is:
Place force-viz.js in a scripts/ directory.
Paste—
<div id="force-viz"></div>
<script src="scripts/force-viz.js"></script>
—into the text of any page, wherever they want the chart to appear.
Making it easy for you
If being forced to program into a single file is annoying, I recommend Browserify. It's a tool that can process a set of JavaScript files with require('whatever.js')-calls to each other, combining them appropriately into one file. With a plugin, it can even turn fs.readSync('data.csv') calls into strings containing that file's contents, which you could use with that CSV file.
That way, you could continue programming the thing as separate files, then run browserify to bundle them up for your client.
Or just do it manually, if this is a one-off project. Your call.
Related
I'm working on Magento modules.
After few guides I managed to create module that says "hellow world".
Also I have made some of css code that add simple image border around whole page.
So the problem is: how to combine them together?
I want that when I install my module, image border appears around page.
What should I be looking for? Any tips? I need right path to look for answers
T.y.
You need to to
Create a module
That modifies the global layout such that your CSS is added to the page
Re: number two, there's multiple ways to go about doing this. These days I favor the event/observer method
Add an observer for the controller_action_layout_generate_blocks_after event
Fetch the head block from the layout in your observer method
If you find a head block, add your CSS file to it programtically
The more traditional way is
Configure you module to include an additional layout update XML file
In the default handle of your new layout update XML file, add XML that tells Magento to add your CSS file
That should give you enough to google on and come back with more specific questions. Good luck!
When I view the source code of yahoo mail, I see multiple css files in a link tag using an & symbol as shown below:
href="http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo?kx/ucs/uh/css/271/yunivhead-min.css&kx/ucs/uh/css/221/logo-min.css&kx/ucs/avatar/css/17/avatar-min.css"
Does anyone know, how they separate each file and load them all using a single http request?
In this case, there seems to be a script that joins the css files into a single response.
The path to the script is http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo. It accepts several parameters containing paths to CSS files, which will then be joined and possibly minified.
If you play around with the URL, you can see that you could remove the -min-Prefixes from the URL and you get the unminified CSS file in return: http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo?kx/ucs/uh/css/271/yunivhead.css&kx/ucs/uh/css/221/logo.css&kx/ucs/avatar/css/17/avatar.css
There are several CSS minifiers around, for example CSSmin. But as this is a Yahoo page, they probably use their own CSS compressor, YUI. For details about how it works, see http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/#work.
Not familiar with the specifics, but the URL looks like a query string with the CSS files as unnamed parameters.
http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo will be a service that loads the CSS, then concatenates and probably minifies the files before serving back to the client.
My guess is that http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo is a small program / script which collects all params (like kx/ucs/uh/css/271/yunivhead-min.css, kx/ucs/uh/css/221/logo-min.css, kx/ucs/avatar/css/17/avatar-min.css), bundles them and minimizes them.
This is similar to the bundling feature for MVC, which you can read about at http://www.davidhayden.me/blog/asp.net-mvc-4-bundling-and-minification (or other sources).
If you take the URL apart what you see is that it's a request to something called "combo" passing in various querystring keys (note there's no values) that are the paths to some CSS files.
These keys will then be extracted in the standard way given the server side language being used and the CSS for that url parsed into a variable before being returned in its entirety to the response.
For their yui project, yahoo development have a project called yuiloader. While designed primarily for yui, the code seems like it can be set up to serve other files as well. This does more than COMBO. it also works out dependancies. with JS and CSS.
As Yahoo is the Y in YUI, this is probably their code base for mail.yimg.com.
The code can be found on https://github.com/yui/phploader.
Basically the issue im having is I have a custom theme, and I need to use $scripts to call the analytics code at the top (the link tracking settings) however this also loads loads of other cr*p js files I dont need or want.
All I want is the analytics stuff the module places in $scripts.
So can I somehow either:
A) Load only the analytics code via $scripts (.info file?)
B) Create a new region in .info file (e.g. $analytics) and call that via the template. But then how do I get the analytics code to output to this new region instead of $scripts?
Any help would be most appreciated.
A.
I would be wary of not outputting $scripts. The files that are output are needed for your other modules to work properly. If you want to reduce the scripts which are output then turn off modules that you don't need.
I agree that disabling the $scripts variable (or cleaning it out) will have some "undesired results". I can think of about half a dozen modules that I use on every build that have required js files.
Maybe you should look into the Google Analytic Module which uses the $footer variable instead of the $scripts.
http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics
I also use this module on all my builds as it provides some very easy integration of Drupal into GA including downloads, user roles, etc. (out of the box)
p.s.
Remember Drupal has a pretty good Performance settings that allow for the cache as well as consolidation css/js.
My final builds have 1 line of markup that calls ALL of my css for that page and one line that does the same for my js. It's been shown that consolidating your asset files into one large file rather then many small ones is a huge performance saver, more so then the size of the end file itself.
So I'm writing a Django based website that allows users select a color scheme through an administration interface.
I already have middleware/context processors that links the current request (based on domain) to the account.
My question is how to dynamically serve the CSS with the account's custom color scheme.
I see two options:
Add a CSS block to the base template that overrides the styles w/variables passed in through a context processors.
Use a custom URL (e.g. "/static/dynamic/css/< website_id >/styles.css") that gets routed to a view that grabs all the necessary values and creates the css file.
I'm content with either option, but was wondering if anyone else out there has dealt with similar problems and could give some insight as to "Best Practices".
Update : I'm leaning towards option number 2, as I think this will allow for better caching down the road. So it's dynamic the first time, gets stored in memcache (or whatever), and invalidated when a user updates their settings in the admin site.
Update: Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone for their suggestions thus far. All the answers thus far have focused around generating static files. Though this would work great in production, it feels like a tremendous burden during development. If I wanted to add a new element to be styled, or tweak existing styles I'd have to go through and recreate each and every css file. Sure, this could be done with a management command, but I just don't feel it's worth it. Doing it dynamically would add 1 maybe 2 queries to each page load, which is something I'm not worried about at this stage. All I need to know is that at some point I will be able to cache it without rewriting the whole thing.
I've used option #2 with success. There are 2 decent ways of updating the generated static files that I know of:
Use a version querystring like /special_path.css?v=11452354234 where the v parameter is generated from a database field, key in memcached, or some other persistent file. Version gets updated by admin, or for development you would just make the generation not save if the parameter was something special like v=-1. You'll need a process to clean up the old generations after some time.
Don't use a version querystring, but have it look first for the generated file, if it can't find it, it generates it. You can create a cron job or WSGI app that looks for filesystem changes for development, and have a hook from your admin panel that deletes generations after an update. Here's an example of the monitoring, which you would have to convert to be specific to your generations and not to Django. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/ReloadingSourceCode#Monitoring%5FFor%5FCode%5FChanges
Could generate the css and store it in a textfield in the same model as the user profile/settings. Could then have a view to recreate them if you change a style. Then do your option 1 above.
Nice question.
I would suggest to pre-generate css file after colors scheme is saved. This would have positive impact on caching and overall page loading time. You can store your css files in directory /media/css/custom/<id or stometing>/styles.css or /media/css/custom/<id or sth>.css and in template add <link rel="stylesheet" href="/media/css/custom/{{some_var_pointing _to_file_name}}" />
You can also do the trick with some random number or date in css file name that could be changed each time file is saved. Thanks to this browser will load the file immediately in case of changes.
UPDATE: example of using model to improve this example
To make managing of those file easy you can create simple model (one per user):
class UserCSS(models.Model):
bg_color = models.CharField(..)
...
...
Fields (like bg_color) can represent parts of your css file. You can ovveride save method to add logic that creates css file for user (by rendering some template).
In case your file format change you can make changes in your's model definition (with some default values for new fields), make little changes in template and run save method for each exisintg instance of class. This would renew your css files.
That should work nicely.
I would create an md5 key with the theme elements, store this key in the user profile and create a ccs file named after this md5 key : you gain static file access and automatic theme change detection.
I have a legacy application that I needed to implement a configuration page for to change text colors, fonts, etc.
This applications output is also replicated with a PHP web application, where the fonts, colors, etc. are configured in a style sheet.
I've not worked with CSS previously.
Is there a programatic way to modify the CSS and save it without resorting to string parsing or regex?
The application is VB6, but I could write a .net tool that would do the css manipulation if that was the only way.
You don't need to edit the existing one. You could have a new one that overrides the other -- you include this one after the other in your HTML. That's what the "Cascading" means.
It looks like someone's already done a VB.NET CSS parser which is F/OSS, so you could probably adapt it to your needs if you're comfortable with the license.
http://vbcssparser.sourceforge.net/
One hack is to create a PHP script that all output is passed through, which then replaces certain parts of CSS with configurable alternatives. If you use .htaccess you can make all output go through the script.
the best way i can think of solving this problem is creating an application that will get some values ( through the URL query ) and generate the appropriate css output based on a css templates
Check this out, it uses ASP.NET and C#.
In my work with the IE control (shadocvw.dll), it has an interesting ability to let you easily manage the CSS of a page and show the effects of modified CSS on a page in realtime. I've never dealt with the details of such implementations myself, but I recommend that as a possible solution worth looking at. Seeing as pretty much everyone is on IE 6 or later nowadays, you can skip the explanations about handling those who only have IE 5,4,3 or 2 installed.
Maybe the problem's solution, which is most simple for the programmer and a user is to edit css via html form, maybe. I suppose, to create css-file, which would be "default" or "standart" for this application, and just to read it, for example, by perl script, edit in html and to write it down. Here is just the simple example.
In css-file we have string like:
border-color: #008a77;
we have to to read this string, split it up, and send to a file, which will write it down. Get something like this in Perl:
tr/ / /s;
($vari, $value) = split(/:/, _$);
# # While you read file, you can just at the time to put this into html form
echo($vari.":<input type = text name = ".$vari." value = ".$value.">");
And here it is, you've got just simple html-form-data, you just shoul overwrite your css-file with new data like this:
...
print $vari[i].": ".$value.";\n";
...
and voila - you've got programmatical way of changing css. Ofcourse, you have to make it more universal, and more close to your particular problem.
Depending on how technically oriented your CSS editors are going to be, you could do it very simply by loading the whole thing up into a TextEdit field to let them edit it - then write it back to the file.
Parsing and creating an interface for all the possibilities of CSS would be an astronomical pain. :-)