The first CKAN Extensions Demo Day brought together developers and practitioners to showcase practical enhancements for CKAN-based data portals. Each extension directly addresses common operational challenges—improving usability, security, metadata management, and user interaction.
The first CKAN Extensions Demo Day brought together developers and practitioners to showcase practical enhancements for CKAN-based data portals. Each extension directly addresses common operational challenges—improving usability, security, metadata management, and user interaction.
Here’s a recap of the tools presented:
Presenter: Oleksandr Cherniavskyi (Link Digital)
ckanext-unfold adds the ability to preview archive files (ZIP, RAR, 7z, and others) directly within CKAN.
Key features:
This extension provides a much-needed update over older tools, especially for portals that store datasets as archives.
Presenter: Andrés Vázquez (Open Knowledge Foundation)
ckanext-push-errors improves monitoring by automatically sending unhandled errors and critical logs to specified endpoints (such as Slack or any HTTP server).
Key capabilities:
This extension is especially useful for managing CKAN instances where developers do not have continuous infrastructure access.
Presenter: Joel Natividad (datHere)
The new DRUF-enabled DataPusher Plus introduces automatic metadata suggestion during file uploads, supporting easier data ingestion and improved metadata quality.
Main features:
This helps streamline the metadata entry process, reducing manual work and improving dataset quality.
Presenter: Michael Polidori (Datopian)
ckanext-querytool enables the creation of interactive visualizations—charts, maps, and tables—directly within the CKAN user interface.
Capabilities:
It provides portal users with more ways to interact with datasets beyond simple downloads.
Presenter: Jesse Vickery (Open Government Canada)
ckanext-citeproc allows CKAN portals to generate formal citations for datasets and resources in multiple academic styles.
Key points:
This improves dataset credibility and facilitates citation in academic and professional publications.
Presenter: Thomas Hanke (Fraunhofer IWM)
ckanext-chat implements a chat interface powered by Pydantic-AI that allows users to query CKAN through natural language.
Main functions:
This extension lowers the technical barrier for interacting with CKAN and can assist in metadata management tasks.
The extensions presented during Demo Day Part 1 address practical needs encountered by open data publishers: from better file handling and real-time error monitoring, to easier metadata entry, improved visualization, and enhanced user interaction.
We look forward to seeing further developments and contributions at CKAN Extensions Demo Day – Part 2 on April 23, 2025.
If you are developing a CKAN extension or thinking about it, there is still time to get involved:
👉 Submit to present
Open source grows stronger with every real-world solution shared. Thank you to all presenters and participants for contributing to a better CKAN ecosystem.
The full recording is available on CKAN’s YouTube channel: CKAN Extensions Demo Day (Part 1) at CKAN Monthly Live.
This CKAN Monthly Live session once again showcased the remarkable innovation happening across the CKAN community. Each extension addresses a real-world problem — from security and scalability to maintainability and usability.
Want to present at CKAN Monthly Live? Fill out this form and we'll contact you or write an email to yoana.popova@datopian.com
Get it on LinkedIn or in your INBOX: Subscribe here.
The second CKAN Extensions Demo Day brought another round of focused, real-world solutions for CKAN-based data portals. Each extension demo tackled persistent challenges—from upload validation and custom data listings to cloud-scale performance and system diagnostics.
When we talk about data portals, we usually focus on their role in collecting and cataloguing data, improving its quality and making it more discoverable and shareable. But even with the very best data portal, it can still just be data sitting on a site.