[ckan-discuss] CKAN 1.4.1 release

Mon Jun 27 12:06:39 BST 2011

Today we have released version 1.4.1 of CKAN, which includes an
important refactor to make it simpler to create custom package editing
forms - see more about this exciting feature below. There are also a
selection of minor improvements, for instance adding 'nofollow' to
reduce link spam.

David

Changelog v1.4.1 2011-06-27 [1]

Major:
  * Refactor Web interface to use logic layer rather than model
objects directly (#1078)

Minor:
  * Links in user-supplied text made less attractive to spammers
(nofollow) #1181
  * Package change notifications - remove duplicates (#1149)
  * Metadata dump linked to (#1169)
  * Refactor authorization code to be common across Package, Group and
Authorization Group (#1074)

Bug fixes
  * Duplicate authorization roles were difficult to delete (#1083)

Editing packages is at the heart of CKAN, and a lot of organisations
running CKAN have customised the edit form.

In the past this was done all in Python code, reusing or creating new
'widgets' based on FormAlchemy, and this generated the form HTML. This
worked well, but you needed to know Python, and sometimes it was not
clear how to tweak the resulting HTML.

Now with CKAN release 1.4.1 we have a new form infrastructure where
the list of fields (and any extra validation required) is defined in a
very simple schema, and the form is designed completely in an HTML
template. This means that the much larger pool of web designers can
tweak the drop-down combos etc. without having to touch any Python.

To give you a flavour of editing the package form, here is the default
HTML template (as used on ckan.net): new_package_form.html [2] and
here are the instructions for the set-up required: Forms using
Templates [3].

Legacy forms using FormAlchemy are deprecated, but can still be used
with the current release, to ease transition. For more information,
see the docs on Forms using FormAlchemy [4].

[1] http://packages.python.org/ckan/CHANGELOG.html
[2] https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckan/src/a394ca150daa/ckan/templates/package/new_package_form.html
[3] http://packages.python.org/ckan/forms.html
[4] http://packages.python.org/ckan/forms.html#forms-using-formalchemy-depreciated