[ckan-dev] publicdata.eu Sprint plan

Seb Bacon seb.bacon at okfn.org
Thu May 26 10:23:53 UTC 2011


On 26 May 2011 10:15, Friedrich Lindenberg
<friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Seb Bacon <seb.bacon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 25 May 2011 16:55, Friedrich Lindenberg
>> <friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Adrià and I have just had a call to coordinate the upcoming PDEU
>>> sprint leading into the digital assembly on the 16th. You can find the
>>> tasks we've agreed upon in this pad:
>>>
>>> http://ckan.okfnpad.org/digital-assembly
>>>
>>> James, Jason: could you give this the nod (tm)?
>>>
>>> Everyone: I'd be very interested in sites that you consider as good
>>> templates for re-theming CKAN?
>>
>> Can you give some context for the re-theming?  Who's the customer and
>> what are their users like?  Geeks, general public, ..?  Is this a
>> standard CKAN site?
>
> The goal here is to do a two-part thing:
>
> 1) Offer a strongly simplfied version, read-only of CKAN under
> publicdata.eu with as much European catalogue data federated into it
> as useful.
>
> 2) Backport the simplified and modernized theme to CKAN main to help
> give us a bit more shininess.
>
> In all of this, there is no real customer but ourselves and the fact
> that pd.eu should be a very simple service people want to come back to
> for data search.

OK, thanks!  It's good to know what everyone else is working on :)

My thinking is that we should indeed go for something extremely
simple, stripped down, and modern.

However, I think that the question of what the default theme of CKAN
should be needs more thought.  For example, on the technical level,
there was a decision a while ago to use Wordpress HTML structure and
CSS clases/id.  I still think that that's arguably a good idea.  It
may be an even better idea to support PHP as a templating language,
but that's another story... */me ducks*

Also, we need to have a think about who we are trying to appeal to
with our default skin.  My opinion is we should be trying to grow our
community by appealing to those who are most likely to influence
decisions to use it on a large scale; potentially Bernard (see
http://wiki.ckan.net/User_Stories -- I updated it yesterday, complete
with scary pictures :)  And I am not sure Bernard would like
functional minimalism.

So, I would prefer if we started out by implementing the new theme as
a stand-alone extension.  Then we can continue discussions (informed
by what you produce for PDEU) about what the *default* theme should
be, and/or even ship CKAN with a choice of themes.

>> Also: re-theming meaning just CSS and header, or more fundamental UI goodness?
>
> No, this is mostly about CSS, but I must admit to thinking about
> restructuring the HTML of CKAN a little bit - if we're going to
> incorporate another layout, the next version of CKAN (with its
> breaking change in forms handling) would be a reasonable point to do
> so (let the protests begin here...)

I think we need a separate thread of discussion about this, as above,
perhaps after you've done PDEU (I think it will be really informative
to start with a minimalist version).

>>> Currently GitHub, Quora, Google
>>> Projects & Fusion Tables are at the top of my list -which info sites
>>> do you like best?
>>
>> In terms of pure visual looks:
>> I like http://www.google.co.uk/search?tbs=isg%3Ato&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=pizza
>> but I don't like Google Code
>
> Curious, rgrp thinks so too while I find it very functional. I'm just
> a fan of those really stripped down things, like
> http://correlate.googlelabs.com/ that was released yesterday: simple
> side bar, search bar, account header - done.

Yes, I like the latter too.  But using Google Code / Projects somehow
makes me wince.  I don't know why.

Seb




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