[ckan-dev] Publishers vs. Publisher-centric package management

Wed Jul 6 08:52:01 UTC 2011

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 8:35 AM, <p.romain at cg33.fr> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I dive in this conversation even if I am not sure to understand all the pro
> and cons of it.
>
> Having looked into what has been achieved by the DGU team, I thought about
> reproducing their architecture for publishing open data material : CKAN for
> storing and organizing data and Drupal for all the animation features.
> The first difficulties I had was to understand the authorization process
> linking some cck filed in drupal and groups and authorizationgroups in CKAN
> I also had difficulties implementing the DGU ckan_package drupal module as
> well as making the ckan app to work. Therefore I end up in the worst
> situation : publishing my content only relying on Drupal features.
>
> If that's acceptable for a first step I am still looking into a more stable
> solution.

Currently this is the best solution and is not too far away from how DGU
works.

The publisher issue you arose is a central one to me. I need to be able to
> provide user acces to ckan as well as drupal. I noticed the XML-RPC code
> provided in the ckan-dgu extension but I was not sure how to work with it.
> Is it the authorization model in CKAN that governs the way users role are
> defined in the Drupal architecture or the other way round ?
>

Currently the Drupal architecture is the one that decides the
authorization.  The xml-rpc just gives ckan the information it needs.

> All the recent improvement made on the CKAN tool (congratulations by the
> way) also makes my thing about what should be implemented on the CMS side
> and what should be left to CKAN.
> The DGU team told me tha they were reconsidering their implementation of
> the interaction between the two but I have no visibility on the direction
> they choose.
>
> Before going further I would need the following elements:
>
> - a clear documentation on how to set up a production environnement of CKAN
> on a linux server (and not only ubuntu distro). I would be happy to
> contribute to the writing of it.

The closest thing we have is this
http://packages.python.org/ckan/deployment.html.  There are many
documentation initiatives around at the moment and it would be better asking
others in the team about this one.

- a explanation of the way the ckan team sees the interaction of this tool
> with other tools like CMS : is it planned to port all the CMS-like features
> into CKAN or is it reasonable to use CMS like wordpress or drupal to
> intercat with it ?
>

The intention is to have a fully supported drupal integration (and
potentially wordpress).   This includes opening up all the work by DGU to be
publicly available and to have a drupal module that is available to easily
customize your own drupal instance.  We may even make drupal the official
ckan fronted.

Concerning publishers, we have not decided the best way yet.  However, ckan
will become much more drupal 'aware' and will both have access to each
others database, so this will simplify things greatly.  The simplest option
would be for ckan to use drupals publishers as an authorization source.
This is why keeping publishers in drupal is the best solution at the moment.

Once this project is set up it would be great to have your feedback into the
best way this integtration can be done.  We intend to set up a group of the
people that would like to get involved in this, can I put you on the list of
people interested?

David
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