Embedding Tableau in a WordPress website

The idea for this article started when Ken Flerlage asked Merlijn to help with an embedding challenge in a WordPress portal for NAEH.org. The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) is a non-partisan organization committed to preventing and ending homelessness in the United States.

In this example Merlijn used WordPress as a portal and Tableau to embed dashboards. There are many examples of portals with a starting page or a starting dashboard. The user navigates from this page/dashboard to another page for more detail by clicking on either a button in the portal, or a mark in the dashboard (for example a state or province). Normally you would have to create separate pages for every state and link to these pages with a Tableau dashboard URL action. This procedure is hard to manage and takes a lot of time to realize and maintain. Therefore, Merlijn created a WordPress Plugin that listens to URL parameters from your browser. This enables embedding dashboards in WordPress with URL actions on a SINGLE page!

Try to reload this page with the buttons below and see what happens with the map on the right. Also, have a look at the url in your browser and note the State parameter at the end! You can look at different States on the same page and you can also change the parameter in the url yourself by typing another state name!

You can embed the dashboard in WordPress with our plugin using a very simple shortcode with the following parameters:

• Dashboard
  • The URL to the dashboard including at least ?:embed=yes or more at the end.
• Parameter
  • The parameter in the main url in your browser the dashboard should be filtered on. (Has to be the existing name of the dimension in Tableau you want to filter on)
• Width
  • Default 100% width, but you can override it
• Height
  • Height of the dashboard