For the last few days I have been scratching my head. How do you plot all the data in your django website, without having to figure out D3 or any other complicated graphing libraries?
I've looked at several solutions, including Djangos Graphos, Chartit, NVD3… Everyone online seems to be recommending to use charting libraries off of this list: https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/charts/
It's frustrating to try many solutions to find out that they are all too complicated to understand, and the copy+paste approach doesn't work most of the time.
However, one good thing came out of this process. I discovered that Plotly is now open-source! Years ago I once played around with Plotly's graphing library, marveling at it's ease of use and admiring it's beauty, however to use it in the past we had to make our plots public for all to see and store them on Plotly's servers. This limited how I could use Plotly in my projects, but that limit isn't on Plotly anymore. Now we can use Plotly just like any other library in Python, Javascript, and other programming languages.
Today I will show you how absolutely easy it is to plot graphs in Django using Plotly's Python API. We are going to make a simple interactive plot that looks like this:
