[R-pkg-devel] Plotly is retiring its R documentation

[Matt Summersgill]

The plotly R package is a tool that makes the Shiny and the
RMarkdown/Quarto HTML formats truly shine. According to this community
announcement, the Plotly organization is preparing to retire R
documentation in November 2025.
https://forum.posit.co/t/plotly-is-retiring-its-r-documentation/208325

I don't want to come across as disparaging the work of other package
creators - there are alternatives for time-series data like dygraphs, newer
projects like ggiraph are taking a stab at interactive plots as ggplot2
focused extension, the rgl package provides a low-level, flexible 3D
plotting capabilities, other interactive GIS libraries provide good mapping
tools, and echarts4r shows promise. However, no single package is as widely
used or provides the full feature-set that the plotly package does today
for interactive visualization. Just based on Stack Overflow question
volume, plotly is used at least an order of magnitude more than any of the
alternatives mentioned above.

To say the least, losing this part of the R ecosystem would create a hole
that might not be filled for some time.

I have opened Issue #2456 on the Github repo for community discussion.
https://github.com/plotly/plotly.R/issues/2456

Matt Summersgill

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