Awesome

Visual Budget

Visual Budget is a WordPress plugin designed to make it easy to visualize a town's budget for its citizenry.

The main Visual Budget Framework repository is here.

Description

VisualBudget is two things: it is both JavaScript module to visualize budget data as well as a WordPress plugin to facilitate data management and creation of visualizations.

The plugin lets users (1) upload datasets as CSV files, (2) create visualizations using a dashboard editor, and (3) embed those visualizations on WordPress pages or other websites.

By default, many of the visualizations interact with each other and with the user, providing a flexibility not many visualization tools offer.

Developer note: The JavaScript module vb.js can be used without the WordPress plugin, but the budget JSON must be correctly formatted and 'chart divs' with correct data attributes must be included on a page for charts to load. In the future we hope to include proper documentation on how to spin up visualizations without the plugin, but for now the best way to learn how to do that is to use the plugin to generate some visualizations and then work from those.

Installation

For users

To install the plugin on your WordPress site, you will need the file zip/visualbudget.zip in this repo. You can either clone the whole repo for that file or download it here.

On the WordPress dashboard there is a "Plugins" link on the sidebar. At the top of the Plugins page there is a button to "Add New". You can simply upload the .zip file of the VisualBudget plugin to install it.

To update the plugin, simply delete it and reinstall. Your datasets are saved in a different folder in your WP installation and will not be lost.

For developers

Compiling the plugin requires Node.js and npm, the Node Package Manager.

After cloning this repo, navigate to it in a terminal and run

$ npm install
$ gulp build

(If the second command returns an error, it may because gulp isn't installed globally. You can fix this by running $ npm install -g gulp.)

To export the plugin to a local WordPress installation, modify the paths.pluginExport variable in gulpfile.js to point to the plugins directory of WordPress (usually at wp-content/plugins/ from the WP base directory), then run

$ gulp plugin-export

Use

Refer to the /docs folder of this repository for comprehensive documentation.

For guidance integrating Visual Town Budget for your town, contact us at arlington-internal@goinvo.com.