[ckan-dev] [#2477] Add extensions section to docs

[Sean Hammond]

Hey all, this ticket asks for a central, up to date list of supported
extensions and their docs to be created. Something to decide in a
standup next week. Right now we have a list of extensions in the docs:

http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.7/extensions.html#choosing-extensions

and that also links to another list on the wiki:

http://wiki.ckan.org/List_of_Extensions

It looks like neither have been updated for a while, so I guess we need
to go through and update them. I'm happy to take on trialling the
extensions and updating the docs but it'd be good to quickly run through
together to get opinions on what should be maintained and what isn't
worth it anymore.

I think we want to have three groups of extensions:

1. Core extensions that are maintained as part of the CKAN code base. We
commit to keeping these working as we develop CKAN, if we don't want to
keep one up to date anymore we move it out of core.  Each one should be
documented in its own section in the CKAN docs. I think it'd be good to
make this list of extensions more prominent in the docs, e.g. a 'Core
Extensions' chapter with a section for each extension, that appears in
the main list of contents. They should all have tests too.

2. Officially supported extensions that are not in core, e.g. because they
have big dependencies that we don't want in core.

We still commit to keeping these working and they should have tests that
we run, e.g.  before merging a big branch into core or before a release.
Consider trying to get jenkins to run the tests for them.

Could we still keep the code for these in the core CKAN git repo, but
give each extension its own requirements file that you only run if you
want to use that extension?

If we do keep the code in core then I'd suggest documenting them in the
core docs like the other extensions. If not, we just do what we're doing
currently, which is to keep a list of links to them in the core docs,
and each extension just has a README.rst file in its git repo.

3. Other extensions, not officially supported.