Major UX grip and incredibly simple to do. May also want to have basic autocomplete support within the list (trivial to do as well I believe).

(Talk to RP about this re how we define lists of licenses).

Would be nice if CKAN could work out of the box without the need for SOLR (solr is great but complex and heavyweight to install).

Propose:

• ckan.simple_search config option
• If set:
  • query via simple query to database backend
  • do no specialized indexing

Extras

Remove

• TagSearchQuery? from lib/search (just do a search directly)?
• #1360: filter by downloadable and filter by open search options

Possible Extras

(Probably future improvements)

• Re-introduce full-text search indexing where supported in e.g. postgres and use for querying

table: task_status

id
entity_id
entity_type
task_type
key
value
last_updated
state

unique(entity_id, task_type, key)

example keys:
last_task_id

Lots of things rely on the old (i.e. pre-SOLR) search param formats, including ckanclient / DGU. Need a translation layer to convert these params (in api v1&2) to SOLR syntax.

This functionality was broken by the changes in #1277 which went into 1.5a

From Ira: PDF of bugs and suggestions is attached.

This ticket is included in release v1.5. Post-v1.5 UX improvements are collected in #1404.

DONE ?

• [dataset/edit]: Deletions are confirmed with a dialog box
• [dataset/edit]: Long URLs break the edit resources tab. Show name (& 'no name') with a pencil icon.
• [dataset/edit]: Rearrange the delete resources mechanism;
  • Use a little minus icon on the far left, followed by a pencil icon for editing.
  • The 'delete resource' button can become 'hide'
  • Deletions are confirmed with a dialog box
• [dataset/edit]: Rearrange the 'you have unsaved changes' warning;
  • Delete the little green plus sign on the right;
  • Try a flash banner instead (more general purpose & beautiful)
• [dataset/edit]: Try a pencil icon (+'hide' button) rather than the +/- buttons which look a bit like you're adding a dataset.
• [dataset/view]: Subscribe button (& subscribe to history) doesn't work as expected. Modal dialog carrying instructions?
• [dataset/view]: Drop the 'add to a group>>' and 'add tag>>'. Needs inline tag-adder.
• [markdown editor]: Tab colours confuse the user. Inactive button appears to be greyed out.
• [dataset/edit]: The upload file UI mutates and breaks across lines; make it a little more rigid. Verify at different zoom levels.
• [groups/add]: Hide unimportant fields
• [navigation] Add 3D bevel (@see github) to current tab highlight.
• [dataset/create and groups/create]: Slug generator can be tidied. Default: Not editable. @see ​http://groupspaces.com/a/group/
• [groups/view]: Show description and owner. To match dataset section.
• [groups/authz]: Tidy to match admin/authz (pretty buttons & spacing). Add navigation bar.
• [groups]: Entire section to use pretty buttons please.
• [about]: Get the about page working on test.ckan.org. (Works locally and on live).

WONTFIX ?

• [dataset/edit]: Make 'tags' a top level form section; it is too important to go below the fold. (wontfix)
• [groups]: Clicking a column heading should sort by that column. Default should be 'size', not 'name'. (ticket #1403)
• ([groups]: (Investigate) Is it easy to implement a little search-groups feature?) (ticket #1403)
• [*/authz]: Add tooltips to explain column headers. (Not required if mechanism is about to be refactored...) (wontfix: we need to rethink this mechanism; authorization refactor is coming)
• [general]: 'Authorization' refactor to 'Permissions' on nav-bars. (wontfix, further discussion. authorization might be less techy...)
• [search]: (Investigate) Can we quickly & easily reintegrate the faceted search-by-license but present it in the sidebar like the other facets? (wontfix: high cost and maintenance overhead; need compelling user story)

Add a way to share datasets and see mentions of datasets on twitter (and elsewhere)

As a visitor I want to share a link to a dataset I have found. I also want to see how many others have shared this (or mentioned it).

• Sharing platform: simplest option is probably twitter but could generalize to e.g. sharethis system which supports, facebook, twitter etc etc.
  • Will need a config option for relevant API key e.g. ckan.sharethis.apikey
• Location: Put this at top of sidebar on dataset view (a better suggsetion?)
• Should show how many mentions / shares there are. (very important!)

Discussion

• (Tom and Ira and ...): do we really want this, versus e.g. proper follow extension?
• What about bringing conversation back in to CKAN. E.g. show all times this dataset (i.e. its url) was mentioned on twitter. If we do this I think this should be definite +1.
• Also, given our users, I think just doing twitter (identica) may be sufficient (how many people want to share links to datasets on facebook?)

Take the resource archiver (currently part of ckanext-qa) and make it into a standalone extension that works as a celery task.

e.g. cz.ckan.net defaults to Czech (config option lang=cs_CZ) but it fails when you try to switch to English.

Regression found by updating datacatalogs.

Implement a banner across the top of the screen giving newbies a link to the about page, and making them feel welcome. See stackoverflow for reference?

While integrating the new theme and making a large number of UX tweaks, I've allowed the CSS file to bloat out of control with some very specific rules and subtle hacks, as well as a couple of clearfix <div> objects in the markup which isn't really good practice.

In general we want a logical CSS structure which is as easy to modify as possible. You should not find yourself being overwritten by highly specific rules all the time!

Actions

1. Clean up css
2. Add a config option ckan.template_head_end - arbitrary string inserted at end of <head> tag so you can add custom css etc (may also want to update theming docs to reflect possibility of using this)
3. (While we're at it): Add ckan.template_footer_end config option to deployment.ini_template. (This already exists, we just haven't told anybody)
4. The /users index page isn't linked anywhere. Clean it up and link it in the footer next to Groups etc.
5. package/new, package/edit, group/new and group/edit all include their forms differently. Use h.literal in all cases.
6. Fix the padding on minornavigation.

Background

David Read sent me the following as background:

22. basic theming is described here: ​http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/theming.html

Deep customisation of the templates is done by creating an extension, with this as a template: ​https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-exampletheme/overview

That's what Augusto and the Brazilians have done ​http://alpha.dados.gov.br/dados/ and their code is here: hg clone ​http://dev.dados.gov.br/codigo/dev/tema-ckan <snip> Another thing of interest was us becoming compatible with Wordpress themes last December. Richard Pope worked with Rufus on this. I believe the base theme is 'twentyten' and I'm guessing that one would swap that css file with another to change theme, but I don't know. I don't know if this feature has been dropped since then. ​http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/2010-December/000073.html

Dave

Need to add way for extensions to trigger based on resource change and just resource url change.

Superticket: #1343

Creation of accounts from OpenID causes large number of problems:

• No guarantee of other profile info
• Poor username (just from openid)

We therefore will:

1. Require creation of user account via register (no auto-creation of accounts via openid)
   • sidebar of register page should point to login page rather than openid signin

2. Permit association of an openid with an account ...
   • How: paste in your openid url (requires change to edit form to have this)
     • won't work for google with their weird openid urls
   • [future] Nicer way is to have login via openid while logged in (which association then happening in background)

3. Migration (for 1+2):
   • (?) Generate decent usernames for all existing accounts
   • As this is nontrivial suggest instead we allow editing of usernames (by account owner and sysadmins). This is useful in its own right and is a reasonable 80/20 solution.
     • This does present the problem of re-associating commits with the new username. Best solution to this would be to switch revisions to point to userid rather than username. See #1534

4. [optional] Change display_name to always be username
   • Change My Account to Username at top right of all pages (once we know usernames are short ...)
     • could do this straight away by truncating long usernames (e.g. truncate at 20 chars ...)
     • Also should we lose the icon?

Needs to update on:

1. language - It's broken on thedatahub.org if you change to German and then click on the CKAN icon top-left to go to thedatahub.org again.

AND

2. whether signed in or not - #1373

BUT not latest revisions (which is what it was)

Or get rid of etag caching on this page and others?

At the paster db init command when installing ckan from source I get the error "Import Error: cannot import name UnicodeMultiDict?" (happens with both ckan 1.4.2 and today's latest bleeding edge code, on Ubuntu 10.04.3).

UnicodeMultiDict? has been removed in a recent version of python-webob, and the pip install ... lucid_missing.txt causes a too-new version of python-webob to be installed into ckan's virtualenv (the new webob gets installed as a dependency of formalchemy).

I manually did pip uninstall webob and then ran paster db init again and it worked.

We want to cache/archive data associated to a resource so it is available if the resource url disappears (and in order to support other processing we may wish to do e.g. webstorer ...)

Etherpad: ​http://ckan.okfnpad.org/queue (most relevant parts inlined here)

Preliminaries

• Add task_status table to store qa/archiever/webstore information that does not need to be versioned. - #1363 (and #1371 - related logic functions)

Configuration setup for daemons

Pass config through to workers i.e site_url, user, api_key. Need to make site user account. #1408

celeryd config:

All providers of tasks will add an item to the following entry point:

[ckan.tasks]
name = ckanext.{name}.tasks:....

celeryconfig.py

from pkg_resources import iter_entry_points
for entry in iter_entry_points:
     celeryimports.appen(....)

CELERY_IMPORTS = celeryimports

Work Items

• Resource change notifications in core - Make an IResourceChange and IResourceUrlChange. [1d] [0.75d] - #1383
• Generate archiving request on resource url change [0.25d][0.25d] - #1399
• Make site user account.
• Make entry point system for celery config
• Archiver daemon #891
  1. implement link-check function and task (point 2 from Archiver.update above) [1d] [0.5d]
  2. Rewrite archiver to use external storage. (decide how!)[3d][~2d]
• Write to resource and task status table.[1d][0.75d]
• [Required?] Make archived data available in WUI - #892
• Documentation - #1400

Superticket: #1397

Generate archiving request on resource url change by implementing IResourceUrlChange and sending tasks to celery. [0.25d][0.25d]

Will be part of of ckanext-archiver extension.

Process:

1. A resource is added to CKAN
2. IResourceCreate event generated
3. IF: resource url points to ckan storage or falls within some other set of exclusion conditions then END else continue
4. Generate a Archiver.Update task with resource.id

if you want your ckan to reside not at ​http://yourhost.org/ but rather e.g. at ​http://yourhost.org/ckan/ you can use this hint ​http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonsdocs/Configuration+Files and set ckan.site_url accordingly in your .ini. However, there are some instances where internal links are created without the required prefix.

To reproduce (from Jonathan Gray):

• I go to add an item to the group
• As I type, I get autocomplete options (cool!)
• When I click on one, it adds this, and copies the same autocomplete option in the box
• When I click submit, it seems to add the item twice
• On the main group page I think it just shows up once, but when I click edit it shows two identical boxes, both ticked - and the count includes two copies of the same item

Basically the problem is allowing the same package associated multiple times with a group.

This is an issue on CKAN 1.5b and probably earlier.

Give site user system administrative rights.

I'd like us to display a one-off banner that prompts users who log into thedatahub.org to go and update & their profile & fill in their email address (if we could do it just for those who don't have an email address, then even better) That is, once they log in, they see a banner which says: Please update your profile [here] and add your email address, so you can receive notifications, be able to reset your password and get updates

Then when we build notifications or if we decide to survey people, we can actually contact them. Email address should be required as standard

DR: Also, mention their Full Name too - v. useful for selecting correct user in group curation

This might well be a bot, but not POSTing the email field should not cause an exception - it should be 400 and then the sysadmin doesn't get these nags.

http://www.publicdata.eu/user/register
...
Module ckan.controllers.user:79 in register
<<              c.login = request.params.getone('login')
                   c.fullname = request.params.getone('fullname')
                   c.email = request.params.getone('email')
                   if not model.User.check_name_available(c.login):
                       h.flash_error(_("That username is not available."))
>>  c.email = request.params.getone('email')
Module webob.multidict:335 in getone
<<          values were found.
               """
               return self._decode_value(self.multi.getone(self._encode_key(key)))
       
           def mixed(self):
>>  return self._decode_value(self.multi.getone(self._encode_key(key)))
Module webob.multidict:99 in getone
<<          v = self.getall(key)
               if not v:
                   raise KeyError('Key not found: %r' % key)
               if len(v) > 1:
                   raise KeyError('Multiple values match %r: %r' % (key, v))
>>  raise KeyError('Key not found: %r' % key)
KeyError: "Key not found: 'email'"

HTTP_USER_AGENT	'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; MRA 4.3 (build 01218); .NET CLR 1.1.4322)'
webob._parsed_post_vars	(MultiDict([('login', 'ahusernames9'), ('fullname', 'ahusernames9'), ('password1', '******'), ('password2', '******'), ('s', 'Sign up')]), <FakeCGIBody at 0xb9d7c5ec viewing MultiDict([('lo...p')])>)

Currently can run as a celery task launched by paster command.

Still have to add a CKAN plugin so that QA will run when a resource is added or URL changed, and then update the extension controller/templates to look for QA data from the task_status table instead of directly on the resource.

Rufus decided this was more trouble than it was worth.

Removes ckan/lib/cache.py

The tag name is limited in length in the db table to 100 characters. If you try and create a longer one you get an exception. This should cause a ValidationError? and tell the user this sensibly.

On some occasions (apparently random), the documents indexed in a specific SOLR core get mixed with different site_ids.

E.g: We look for all documents in the testing.iatiregistry.org core, faceted by site_id. We would expect all documents to have site_id = iati_testing, but some of them have site_id = iatiregistry.org

​http://okfn-solr.fry-it.com:8080/solr/testing.iatiregistry.org/select?indent=on&version=2.2&q=*:*&fq=+state:active&facet=true&facet.field=site_id

<lst name="facet_fields">
<lst name="site_id">
<int name="iati_testing">265</int>
<int name="iatiregistry.org">255</int>
</lst>
</lst>

If we compare one of the records which disappeared from the "iati_testing" site_id in both the production and testing SOLR cores of the server, the records are exactly the same, including the indexed_ts property:

​http://okfn-solr.fry-it.com:8080/solr/iatiregistry.org/select?indent=on&version=2.2&q=id:97d1ab0d-b203-4757-8f4e-a0c84d2f759f&facet=true&facet.field=site_id

​http://okfn-solr.fry-it.com:8080/solr/testing.iatiregistry.org/select?indent=on&version=2.2&q=id:97d1ab0d-b203-4757-8f4e-a0c84d2f759f&facet=true&facet.field=site_id

Note that the response from the URLs shown may vary, as the testing site could have been reindexed.

Why: current stable version of sqlalchemy. geoalchemy stuff required 0.7 and likely that some other things will require it soon.

Probably requires work on vdm ​https://bitbucket.org/okfn/vdm

NB: should have discussion before making 0.7 the default required version in CKAN core.

paster db load ckan.pgdump will load in the database but not update the search index, no we're using SOLR.

implementation

We can't tack on 'rebuild' to this command, because it needs a 'db upgrade' first. I'm tempted to make 'db load' do the upgrade and rebuild all in one command.

If you try to GET a dataset, purge it then POST it again, it fails checking authz for the group:

Module ckan.controllers.api:278 in create
<<                  (register, subregister))
               try:
                   response_data = action(context, data_dict)
                   location = None
                   if "id" in data_dict:
>>  response_data = action(context, data_dict)
Module ckan.logic.action.create:240 in package_create_rest
<<      api = context.get('api_version') or '1'
       
           check_access('package_create_rest', context, data_dict)
       
           dictized_package = package_api_to_dict(data_dict, context)
>>  check_access('package_create_rest', context, data_dict)
Module ckan.logic:129 in check_access
<<          #    log.debug('Valid API key needed to make changes')
               #    raise NotAuthorized
               logic_authorization = new_authz.is_authorized(action, context, data_dict)
               if not logic_authorization['success']:
                   msg = logic_authorization.get('msg','')
>>  logic_authorization = new_authz.is_authorized(action, context, data_dict)
Module ckan.new_authz:16 in is_authorized
<<      auth_function = _get_auth_function(action)
           if auth_function:
               return auth_function(context, data_dict)
           else:
               raise ValueError(_('Authorization function not found: %s' % action))
>>  return auth_function(context, data_dict)
Module ckan.logic.auth.create:115 in package_create_rest
<<          return {'success': False, 'msg': _('Valid API key needed to create a package')}
       
           return package_create(context, data_dict)
       
       def group_create_rest(context, data_dict):
>>  return package_create(context, data_dict)
Module ckan.logic.auth.create:15 in package_create
<<      else:
               
               check2 = check_group_auth(context,data_dict)
               if not check2:
                   return {'success': False, 'msg': _('User %s not authorized to edit these groups') % str(user)}
>>  check2 = check_group_auth(context,data_dict)
Module ckan.logic.auth.create:90 in check_group_auth
<<      groups = set()
           for group_dict in group_dicts:
               id = group_dict.get('id')
               if not id:
                   continue
>>  id = group_dict.get('id')
AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'get'

(using RESTful Model API)

The reason is the POST is expecting the group to be expressed as a dict, not the list of names that GET returns.

Super ticket: #1032

• Locate at: /dataset/{dataset}/resource/{id}

See: ​http://wiki.ckan.org/Dataset_View_Page

Implemented in branch feature-1445-resource-view.

Still to do:

• Add inline data explorer to page

Celery is awkward to deply, need to find a way to do it more simply. i.e using celery-pylons and supervisor. A modified version of celery-pylons may be the best solution. 1d

See ​http://wiki.ckan.org/Dataset_and_Resource_Pages_Proposal

• Create a collapsible section for the README
• Reduce the number of things on the page
• Tidy up groups and tags in the sidebar
• Resource view becomes a list of search results

(additional)

• Resource navbar item links to first resource
• Resource navbar has a dropdown menu of all resources in the dataset
• Edit and Authz navbar items should be in a separate logical group to the right

Very rough summary: create more info section and move stuff out (relayout page e.g. README, tags etc)

Allowing more flexible tag names:

• allowing spaces
• allow capital letters (search is case in-sensitive)
• allow all punctuation except for commas and double-quotes '"'
• allow unicode
• commas delimit tag names in the package create/edit form

Effects:

• package creation/edit form.
• /tag/{tagname} uri
• search action
• api controller (search/package-create/edit)
• web controller (search/package-create/edit)
• search api documentation
• autocomplete for tag names

When you do a search like this:

http://thedatahub.org/api/search/package?q=tauberer+census&all_fields=1

the "extra" fields (e.g. "triples", "shortname") get missed off the results. The docs say it should be a "full record" and I don't see any reason why this is missed off.

This is a problem because search all_fields is the only way for clients and front-ends to get packages in bulk. They end up (like lodcloud) doing thousands of requests to get packages individually.

The full record is:

http://thedatahub.org/api/rest/dataset/2000-us-census-rdf
{"count": 1, "results": [{"res_description": ["Download", "XML Sitemap", "SPARQL enpdoint", "Example (RDF/XML)"], "name": "2000-us-census-rdf", "license": "Non-OKD Compliant::Creative Commons Non-Commercial (Any)", "author": "Joshua Tauberer", "author_email": "http://razor.occams.info/", "ckan_url": "http://thedatahub.org/dataset/2000-us-census-rdf", "notes": "2000 U.S. Census converted into over a billion RDF triples.\n\nPopulation statistics at various geographic levels, from the U.S. as a whole, down through states, counties, sub-counties (roughly, cities and incorporated towns)\n\nNotes: also found in the of SPARQL Endpoints.\n\nFrom home page:\n\n> * For the detailed Census statistics, you'll have to download the raw Census data files from the Census Bureau, my Perl script and the patch file below and run it yourself because the files are too big for me to offer as a download!\n> \n> * The data and scripts can be reused under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.\n", "entity_type": "package", "site_id": "www.ckan.net", "download_url": "http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/census/", "indexed_ts": "2011-11-01T12:52:36.034Z", "url": "http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/census/", "state": "active", "title": "2000 U.S. Census in RDF (rdfabout.com)", "groups": ["lod", "lodcloud"], "res_format": ["", "meta/sitemap", "api/sparql", "example/rdf+xml"], "license_id": "cc-nc", "revision_id": "fcbad0de-79ea-41bd-8e01-eb832a05b732", "res_url": ["http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/census/", "http://www.rdfabout.com/sitemap.xml", "http://www.rdfabout.com/sparql", "http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/geo/us/ny"], "id": "551ec435-f198-4d52-9b56-ec0b0be6aec9", "tags": ["census", "data", "demographics", "deref-vocab", "format-dc", "format-geonames", "format-politico", "format-rdf", "geographic", "linkeddata", "lod", "lodcloud.nolinks", "no-license-metadata", "no-provenance-metadata", "no-vocab-mappings", "population", "published-by-third-party", "rdf", "statistics", "us"]}]}

e.g. package_register_get.

At the moment most of the harvesting functionality is only available to sysadmins. This is fine for most cases but going forward we will need to grant each publisher access to their own sources, harvest objects and harvest object errors. This will probably be done based on the groups refactor.

One more pressing concern is giving DGU publishers the ability to make calls to /harvest/object/id. We want them to be able to see documents that faild validation and also to see *all* errors in each document.

Now that we have a geospatial search API, we should build a front-end that integrates with the existing search for displaying results.

Nils flagged up that Ubuntu launches another LTS in April which we should probably move to. This ticket is to get the ball rolling with what we do. We can always include in our package the exact package versions of deps that we want, but it is good to be in line with the release if possible.

Here's how to see the packages included with it: ​http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=python-pylons&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all

Pylons 0.9.7 -> 1.0-2 Requires a small amount of work SQLAlchemy 0.7.3-2 OK Babel 0.9.6-1 OK Genshi 0.6-2 Perfect

Another alternative is to move to another web framework, especially minding that Pylons is not being further developed.

Max length of package name and version field is 100 characters, but the validators seem to enforce this, although in the web interface the javascript limits typing in these fields, so it just affects the API really.

This will comprise of the following steps.

• model migration.
• simplify revisioning
• Remove any sqlalchemy relations from groups.
• change logic functions

estimate 2d

munge_title_to_name, munge_tag v. useful for client software importing things into CKAN. I want it for ONS.

Three JS bugs have appeared:

• The slug editor is not updating the text field again. [Fixed; commit:fadda17383]

• The View Dataset page will stop executing javascript if there are no resources. [Fixed; commit:e54b089f6e]

• The Add-Dataset and Add-Group URL editor shows the wrong URL for datasets and groups. Broken in this commit:

​https://github.com/okfn/ckan/commit/5a01e67 by 'map.explicit=true'. JohnG: Can you look into this? [Fixed; commit:88e88380f6]

e.g.

curl http://localhost:5000/api/action/package_create -d '{"name":"test5", "tags":[{"name": "tag6"}, {"name": "tag6"}]}' -H 'Authorization:tester'

Also broken in Web UI (adding a package).

Affects API and Web UI in 1.5 and I think all versions from 1.4.1

1. Call ckan.logic.action.update:package_update()
2. Pass in a context dict with "allow_partial_update":True
3. Pass in a partial data dict containing only the package's ID and those fields that you want to update (e.g. title).

=> All of the package's resource will have their statuses changed to "deleted".

The "allow_partial_update" option should apply to the resource lists of packages, but it does not.

Add the list of extensions install (config's ckan.plugins) to status_show logic action (See #1087)

Sean spotted that some strings need internationalising, such as flash messages. Generally all strings that appear on the web front-end should be internationalised.

Particular places that need i18n:

• ckan/controllers/admin
• ckan/lib/base

Note: there are some exceptions, such as in i18n.py, very obscure error messages and stuff that only appears on the API.

NB: there is a cost in making a string internationalisable (all our volunteers have to translate it), so we should not be too zealous. We should also look at the i18n/ckan.pot to see if any of the existing strings can be reused.