[ckan-dev] News from CKAN

Fri Oct 12 15:10:41 UTC 2012

> Good to hear the new develpments of CKAN!
> 
> I have a couple of questions about the planned CKAN 2.0.
> 
> Is it going to use the Pyramid web framework?

No, we're still using Pylons which, to be honest, seems to be doing us
fine, I think. Switching web framework would be a major internal change
that would take a lot of work and change a lot of code. I think if we
ever did do it, we would consider Pyramid as well as other Python web
frameworks that are newer than Pylons.

CKAN 2.0 is not an entirely new code base it is an evolution of CKAN
1.x, it has just evolved far more than it normally does from one
release to another. The biggest change has been the entirely new
frontend, replacing Genshi with Jinja templates and rewriting our
javascript.

> The other question is about backwards compatibility. I don't suppose 1.x
> extensions compatibility will be a requirement for CKAN 2.0, but I think
> that should be made a clear statement. However, IMO there should be an easy
> way to migrate data from a CKAN 1.x instance to 2.0.

CKAN 1.x Genshi templates are still supported in CKAN 2.0 as "legacy
templates". Support will eventually be removed in a later release. The
new Jinja-based template system is _much_ nicer!

There is no particularly easy way to "migrate" from Genshi to Jinja
templates, you basically have to rewrite your Genshi template code in
Jinja, no way around it.