[ckan-discuss] Groups -> themes?

Mon Dec 9 23:24:16 UTC 2013

At the moment we have 2 core types of Group in CKAN.

1.  Confusingly also called "Group"
2.  "Organization"

The work we need to do is letting people change the outward name (or
even alternative api endpoints) of each of these things in an
extension, to whatever is desired, and making sure that these are
translatable.  We could even offer a few core extensions todo this for
common alternatives such as to "Theme"/"Category"/Collection" or
"Publisher".  This will mean the translations and tests will be in
core too.   I think we should keep the defaults as they are,
nonetheless, so to make any new developer not too confused to begin
with (as Sean was saying).   So only when somebody says, "ah in my use
case these things are more like Themes than Groups" then they have an
easy switch to change it.  So basically the same solution as Mark,
just instead of config options make sure our current IGroup extension
works correctly and have a few preconfigured versions in core.

There is fair amount of work needed to do this, making sure we cover
all the places these terms crop up and make the extension/docs good
enough so we don’t forget in future.  It is very hard to find the
justification in doing such work unless someone has a real short term
need for it.

On 9 December 2013 19:42, Sean Hammond <sean.hammond at okfn.org> wrote:
> On 09.12.2013 18:39, Mark Wainwright wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm with Adria on this. I was against using groups and organizations as
>>> the names, but now that we have them, I say we call a moratorium on
>>> renaming features in CKAN until after we've purged the word "package"
>>> from all code and docs!
>>
>>
>> Hmm, I don't know that such behind-the-scenes purging is as important
>> as a good UI, but anyway, surely 'after we've purged the word
>> "package"' is the *worst* possible time to go tinkering with other
>> terms in the UI - since it's then too late to purge them from the code
>> and docs at the same time.
>
>
> It's really hard to purge a word like group or package from CKAN completely
> (the word group appears in the ckan code tens of thousands of times). It'd
> be a really big change that would take ages and be really disruptive to
> other work on the code. Changing multiple words at the same time would be
> even worse.
>
> So what you'd probably end up with is what we have with package/dataset: the
> word package may not appear in the web UI anymore, but as soon as the user
> hits the command-line interface, config file, API, writing extensions or
> themes, or working on the source code, they come across it.
>
> I think it's quite messy to have this with one major feature, having it with
> two or three would be really messy. Imagine having to always remember (and
> explain to new CKAN developers) that datasets are also called packages,
> themes are also called groups, and publishers are also called organizations.
>
> I agree they names are bad but the cost of changing them now is high.
>
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