I’m very pleased to announce the release of ggplot2 2.0.0. I know I promised that there wouldn’t be any more updates, but while working on the 2nd edition of the ggplot2 book, I just couldn’t stop myself from fixing some long standing problems.
On the scale of ggplot2 releases, this one is huge with over one hundred fixes and improvements. This might break some of your existing code (although I’ve tried to minimise breakage as much as possible), but I hope the new features make up for any short term hassle. This blog post documents the most important changes:
- ggplot2 now has an official extension mechanism.
- There are a handful of new geoms, and updates to existing geoms.
- The default appearance has been thoroughly tweaked so most plots should look better.
- Facets have a much richer set of labelling options.
- The documentation has been overhauled to be more helpful, and require less integration across multiple pages.
- A number of older and less used features have been deprecated.
These are described in more detail below. See the release notes for a complete list of all changes.
Extensibility
Perhaps the bigggest news in this release is that ggplot2 now has an official extension mechanism. This means that others can now easily create their on stats, geoms and positions, and provide them in other packages. This should allow the ggplot2 community to flourish, even as less development work happens in ggplot2 itself. See vignette("extending-ggplot2") for details.
Coupled with this change, ggplot2 no longer uses proto or reference classes. Instead, we now use ggproto, a new OO system designed specifically for ggplot2. Unlike proto and RC, ggproto supports clean cross-package inheritance, which is necessary for extensibility. Creating a new OO system isn’t usually the right solution, but I’m pretty sure it was necessary here. Read more about it in the vignette.
New and …read more
Source:: http://blog.rstudio.org