News from the CKAN team 27 July 2012

  Here's a quick roundup of activity in the CKAN team over the past few weeks.

Next release

Everyone has been busy preparing for the next version of CKAN, which will be CKAN 1.8. Adrià has branched the source code for the release and deployed it to a test server. It will undergo further testing, bugfixing and documentation before the new version is released some time in August.

Events

Rufus went to Washington DC to present at the International Open Government Data Conference. Ira has also been travelling, to the European Data Forum in Copenhagen, where she made a clutch of new friends and introduced many people to CKAN. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500"] Rufus Pollock presenting at IOGDC 2012[/caption]## Demo site Toby and Aron, with design input from Sam, requests and testing from Ira, and help from most of the rest of the team, have been working hard on the new demo installation mentioned in a previous update, designed to showcase CKAN's features, interface, and theming, to organisations that may be thinking of installing it. It has not been officially launched yet but a sneak preview may be had here. It includes some new features, such as form auto-completion.

Features and fixes

As usual there have been a stream of upgrades and bug fixes, mostly minor, including some improvements to the Recline data explorer. One change to the code that is significant though it will not directly affect users relates to the HTML templating system CKAN uses. From version 1.9, the old Genshi templating system will be replaced by Jinja, which is more flexible and will make life easier for site-owners who want to apply their own theming to CKAN, (and indeed for CKAN's developers).

Upgrading CKANs

A number of the community CKAN instances for which the OKFN provide web hosting have been upgraded recently, including OpenColorado, which upgraded from version 1.3.1, and CKAN Norway. At present each such upgrade is quite time-consuming. In the longer term we hope to move to a 'CKAN Hosted' system with much smoother automatic upgrading of both community and other instances hosted by OKFN. Work also continues on the forthcoming Open Data portal for the European Commission, and supporting CKAN partner NAI in their work on a portal for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

ckan.org

Finally, the CKAN website has seen some changes too. There is a new developers' section including an outline CKAN roadmap and links to developer documentation, and an instances page listing installations of CKAN around the world. A separate section contains details of the Open Knowledge Foundation's professional services such as hosting and consultancy.