WP Chart Generator - installation & test report

@Marcus Couch notes that "[I]t’s a killer plugin for creating pie charts on the fly that don’t use external Google Chart API callouts". There are many good reasons to avoid or minimize 3rd-party dependencies. Recent news that major providers of Internet-based services collaborate with spy-agencies, should motivate a broadening climate of caution. Google is not in it to be your buddy ... have no real committment to or lasting interest in any implied partnership role on your website.

Upon beginning the installation of this plugin, the first thing noticed is that although it shows as updated "5 days ago", it is only "Compatible up to: 3.1.4". Accurate or not, that's what it says. (Normally, we would just 'move on', upon seeing it that outdated.)

Once installed, it's all in French, as Marcus notes. If you have wide familiarity with many kinds of plugins, have in fact installed & played with hundreds if not thousands of them, as Marcus says it can be figured out. If you aren't that much of a plugin-Ninja, otoh, and it is not 'evident' how to proceed, you may be stumped.

For example, there is a graphical color-picker, but once a color was selected with it, I never did figure out how to get the numeric value for that color into the color-value input-box. Fortunately, I know hexidecimal a lot better than I do French ... and I created color-values directly by hand, in hex. But that didn't work either.

What really 'saved' this plugin, for me, is that there is only a single thing you can click. Keep clicking the same bar, and what needs to happen keeps unfolding. If there had been any additional functionality, I may well have been stumped. Actually, I did almost give up ... what I thought was the color-value, is the data-value ... and the chosen color remains in the graphical picker. It was not obvious to me, that that was how it worked.

A leading weakness or need that I felt with this plugin, is that additional information about the statistics, like their source, (metadata) couldn't be included. Typically, this really won't cut it.

I especially wanted to see how the Legend/Key would work, with a more-realistic set of data. I chose the well-known & commonly-cited Cukier and Sidel (2006) The Global Gun Epidemic stats on ten nations.

I entered the 10 nation-names and the gun-homicide values for each. I picked 10 different colors that looked good. The editing went well, once I saw how to proceed.

Unfortunately, the subsequent steps involving copying a shortcode and getting it into a Post did not work out, and while attempting to get this to happen, the entire dataset and all the editing disappeared.

And that's all the time I have for this right now. Pretty good input-environment, once you catch onto the secret handshake. The color-picker system is a nice solution; compact and entirely visual.

Negative reports are still valuable information. I might be able to overcome what finally derailed me. I may try a couple tiny data-sets, to see if I can actually get a pie chart on the screen ... and try to post it here.