[ckan-discuss] Idea: Mini-site creator

Tue Sep 13 23:11:42 BST 2011

Moving back on-list ... (think you accidentally dropped list on last one!)

On 13 September 2011 21:43, Tim McNamara <tim.mcnamara at okfn.org> wrote:
> On 14 September 2011 07:56, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Couldn't one just use a CKAN group?
>
>> While I think this is interesting I'm not yet clear what you get over
>> just using CKAN. It seems like you'll go to quite a bit of effort just
>> to reproduce something that is less  functional than the CKAN
>> instance.
>
> I wanted to provide more information in summary/index page than is
> currently provided: tags mainly. A package's tags are easier to glance
> over.

Ah got it. I think adding tags to summary view for dataset is a good
idea (i do it in the DataDeck). Others like Friedrich are more
sceptical as he thinks tags are less useful.

>> Going back to your original point: if people want a 'site' that's just
>> for datasets for a specific event one the group would seem to serve
>> them really well providing a single point of entry for what they are
>> looking for.
>>
>>> I think this could be very useful for people who would like to create
>>> micro-sites on particular areas, such as environmental data and so
>>> forth.
>>
>> But isn't that exactly what the 'groups' do -- allow you to create a
>> mini-site within CKAN for a specific area?
>
> The main limitation with groups is that they require manual
> intervention. CKAN's API doesn't allow packages to be added to groups.
> (http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/api.html#model-methods)

OK, that looks like something we should support better in the API.
That said, I imagine the average use will find the web interface
easier than the API ;-) -- and even if not how bad is it to got to the
groups page and just use the dataset auto-complete to add e.g. 20
datasets to a group in approx 30s ...

> I would prefer to be able to give a config file to CKAN and for it to
> work out which packages are included itself. Something like:
>
> tags:
>  - water
>  - air
>
> fulltext
>  - full
>  - text
>  - strings
>
> packages
>  - manually included packages

Ah I think I see more now. You want to auto-generate groups based on a
certain criteria. As a start you could try just having a query link at
the top of the group page linking to the queries yielding you those
things (as well as having the datasets explicitly in that group).

>> The obvious limitation is you have only one page of 'content'. But if
>> you want more than that I imagine it will be a pain using a static
>> site generator -- and integrating with something like wordpress would
>> be much more attractive. If you are going that route what about
>> integrating wordpress and the ckanjs -- I imagine a setup where you
>> just drop one line of javascript into a page on your wordpress (or
>> whatever) site and you can embed all of the datasets from a given
>> group (plus search).
>
> Maybe I should draft a tutorial on how to build an app like your data deck?

that would be very useful ...

Rufus