[ckan-discuss] Idea: Mini-site creator

Tue Sep 13 20:56:52 BST 2011

On 31 August 2011 00:13, Tim McNamara <tim.mcnamara at okfn.org> wrote:
> I've received great feedback on a proposal in the emergency & disaster
> management communities. I have had an idea that will really make
> things happen. However, I would like people's feedback on a thought
> I've had to really maximise its usefulness.
>
> The idea is to  to leverage the power of thedatahub.org to collect the
> ad hoc spreadsheets, geodata, etc that are produced during emergency
> responses. Details:
> http://notebook.okfn.org/2011/08/24/adding-structure-to-ad-hoc-data-sharing-in-emergencies/.
> The problem is that this requires people knowing specific tags of
> events. This is not really helpful to people who have not used CKAN
> before.  I've had a few requests for some micro-site would be able to
> just display data for a particular event. The best response I could
> come up with was, 'Well, people could build a site with the API'.
> However, I would like to do better.

Couldn't one just use a CKAN group? It already allows you to provide
'content' in the form of a description and the group automatically
lists all the datasets in there. One additional feature that would be
nice (and very easy to write) would be a search box which
automatically filters on datasets in that group (i.e. the search is
just of that group's datasets).

> I would like people's feedback and assistance to create a static site
> generator that basis itself on tags/searches from CKAN instances. The
> application searches for particular tags, then downloads (caches) the
> data for every package. It then builds a static site with an index
> page and pages for each package. Almost exactly like CKAN, only
> topic-specific and read only. Finally, it uploads the static HTML to
> Dropbox or similar. I thought the generator could be run in the
> background and checks to see if anything has changed each minute or
> so.

While I think this is interesting I'm not yet clear what you get over
just using CKAN. It seems like you'll go to quite a bit of effort just
to reproduce something that is less  functional than the CKAN
instance.

Going back to your original point: if people want a 'site' that's just
for datasets for a specific event one the group would seem to serve
them really well providing a single point of entry for what they are
looking for.

> I think this could be very useful for people who would like to create
> micro-sites on particular areas, such as environmental data and so
> forth.

But isn't that exactly what the 'groups' do -- allow you to create a
mini-site within CKAN for a specific area?

The obvious limitation is you have only one page of 'content'. But if
you want more than that I imagine it will be a pain using a static
site generator -- and integrating with something like wordpress would
be much more attractive. If you are going that route what about
integrating wordpress and the ckanjs -- I imagine a setup where you
just drop one line of javascript into a page on your wordpress (or
whatever) site and you can embed all of the datasets from a given
group (plus search).

Rufus