[ckan-discuss] Basic orientation to CKAN

Tue Aug 21 11:44:48 BST 2012

>    Hello everyone,
>    I'm doing a technical review of CKAN to assess if and how we might use
>    it as an open data platform here at the World Bank.  I'm trying to "get
>    under the hood" so to speak. So far I've finished the installation and
>    started to dig into the documentation.  But I'm starting to hit some
>    roadblocks and need some advice.
>    I have several years of developer experience of the LAMP variety, but
>    almost none with the frameworks that CKAN is built on (e.g., python,
>    postgresql, solr, etc.).  And CKAN in turn seems to build on several
>    Python-specific frameworks like genshi and pylons.  My instinct is to
>    learn both by reading the manual along with the code, But to a newbie
>    such as myself, it's difficult to ascertain what is specific to CKAN
>    versus what is Pylons or even some unknown (to me) framework. Can
>    anybody recommend an orientation or roadmap to come up to speed?
>    I was optimistic when I found the "Roadmap" link:
>    [1]http://ckan.org/developers/roadmap.  But unfortunately it's broken.
>    Thanks in advance,
>    Tim

Hi Tim,

Glad to hear that you're interested in CKAN! You bring up a good point,
we could probably use a high-level overview of the architecture of the
CKAN source code to be added to the 'For CKAN Developers' section of the
documentation.

For now, here's a quick overview that I've thrown together this morning.
This should help you do dive into the CKAN source code. I hope this is
what you were looking for:

https://gist.github.com/3414107

I've also created a ticket to get something based on this overview added
to the docs for a future version of CKAN:

http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/2883