[ckan-dev] thedatahub.org bug reports: (i) User profile page, (ii) Registering a new account

Sat Jan 28 17:44:00 UTC 2012

A couple of bugs/usability issues with thedatahub.org reported by
users at open econ hack day.

1. User profile page

The format of the table on this page is not very helpful.
(i) There are two columns of incomprehensible IDs, but none with the
name of the dataset!
(ii) The 'revision' is a link to a page for the revision, but with no
info. Eg there is nothing under 'datasets' even though a dataset was
edited. ie this page gives no info about the revision.
(iii) The user thought it was a list of datasets she had uploaded
(since most of her revisions were uploading datasets) and was confused
by a seemingly blank revision. She wanted to be able to link someone
to the datasets she'd just uploaded.

Suggestion - have columns:
Date = human readable date and time, which links to the page for the
revision - showing some useful info about the revision (
Author (assuming the list is in a standard format where sometimes the
authors are not all the same)
Dataset (linking to the dataset - rather than 'entity' which just shows the url)
Log message

Any thoughts how to present 'datasets I've uploaded'?

2. Registering a new account

If you try to use a capital letter in your 'Login', you get the
unhelpful error message:
"The form contains invalid entries: Name: Url must be purely lowercase
alphanumeric (ascii) characters and these symbols: -_"

What does 'Name' or 'Url' have to do with anything? It means 'Login must be ...'
But even better would be to make it case-insensitive and allow
capitals to be entered.

-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
Skype: m.wainwright