Cycle 2024.7: Narrative charts

[marcelgerber]

Goal: Make narrative charts a first-class member in our database and admin. They can be created in the admin and embedded in an article. They are linked to a parent chart (config), and link back to a grapher page.

Notes

See this Notion page for more context.

Checklist

Database

• Add a database table for narrative views [2h]
  • chart_views: id, slug, chart_config_id [fk], createdAt, updatedAt?
  • should they always start with a nv- or view- prefix?

Admin [5d]

• Allow creating a view from an existing chart [1.5d]
• Display "child" charts based on this chart [2h]
• Allow navigating up to the parent chart [1h]
• Make it apparent that a slug cannot be changed after publication [0h]
• Build new admin page to list/search/edit chart views from [1.5d]
• Create/update/delete workflow [part of above]
• Make it easy to hide all controls [4h]
• Always explicitly persist some important fields [4h]:
  • selectedEntityNames, tab, time
• Compute & store query params that need to be applied to the parent [4h]
• Make link to this view easily copyable [1h]
• Make "Explore this data" link with query params easily copyable [1h]
• (open question) either require parent chart to be published, or don't link out if it's unpublished
• Hide slug field [1h]
• [UX] Provide nicer field to enter slug into, including checking that it's free
• [UX] Different implementation (or get rid of) for popup blocker circumvention

Grapher [4d]

• "Explore this data" should link to a published grapher chart with many settings from the narrative view applied via query params [1d]
• Hide controls for narrative views: e.g. share button should always be hidden [2h]
• Adapt thumbnail worker to work correctly for narrative views [1d]
• Adapt download modal to behave correctly [2h]
• Make sure grapher doesn't rely on /grapher/[slug] being its own URL (which it currently does in many places) [1d]
• Include analytics events for certain events (chart view, title click, "Explore" click, ...) [3h]
• Apply new, darker background color for "Explore this data" button [1h]

Gdocs [4h]

• Create/adapt gdocs block to allow embedding narrative charts [4h]

Content [1.5d]

• Create spreadsheet of current uses of narrative views [2h]
• Turn all existing gdoc-based narrative views (not a lot) into new narrative views [4h]
• Update DI gdocs template to include narrative chart link [1h]
• Create example DIs that display an (interactive) narrative view instead of the static image [3h]

Others

• (?) Adapt chart-sync

[marcelgerber]

Closing this cycle issue now, since the main part of this has been completed with #4295 just now.
I've created a follow-up issue with nice-to-haves for the future: #4444