backup ckan installation and multilingual ckan

[Skaros Ilias]

Hi all,
I got my self into an open data project and now i have to learn a bit about ckan administration.

I was asked to check for two things,
first if there is a way to back up the whole of our ckan installation to a single file.
Is that possible? I have seen on the ckan docs that i can back up the database, but if i restore this to a fresh ckan installation, will it work as intended, with out any problems?

In general, what is the best solution to ensure the minimum trouble when a server hosting the ckan installation is down? having a secondary ckan on a different server, redirecting the traffic there?
 
Also they want to have a dual language support for their ckan site. English and Greek. Some of the datasets will have the same data but in some(most) of the cases, data will be completely different for the two languages. I have seen some cases (like the Canadian Ckan site) but i am not sure how to progress on that matter.

Thank you, Ilias

[Steven De Costa]

Hi Skaros,

You use cloud hosting and run CKAN on something like this:

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B015XZHNDI/ref=sp_mpg_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-3

Then you can automate snapshots of the whole environment to be backed up to S3 or Glacier. Recovery is then very easy.

If you setup a more 'enterprise' environment then you can use multiple web application servers and maybe just one DB server with EBS mounted to it for files and data storage. You can script the replacement of web application servers if they become unresponsive and do lots of other things to build a highly resilient environment. 

Generally, it is worth thinking about cloud hosting infrastructure as part of the software stack and architect the entire solution to meet your needs. This includes Development environments, user testing, pre-production and production.

For the bilingual option, take a look at the Canadian Government portal as they have both French and English. Ian Ward from Datacats is the main person who has had a lot of experience with solving bilingual needs.

I'm guessing you know you can switch between language pretty easy, so your question is more around the user generated content being bilingual, or displaying two languages at once for some interface elements...

Take a look at the Greek translation here too:

https://www.transifex.com/okfn/ckan/

It is really easy to get setup as a contributor and ensure Greek is covered for all the main releases of CKAN. I'd suggest doing 2.2 through to 2.4. As each release of CKAN might introduce more fields you'll just want to stay on top of translations.

There is usually a call for these via the developer list prior to a release :)

Cheers,

Steven

STEVEN DE COSTA | EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
www.linkdigital.com.au

   

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[Skaros Ilias]

Hi Steven

You use cloud hosting and run CKAN on something like this:

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B015XZHNDI/ref=sp_mpg_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-3

Then you can automate snapshots of the whole environment to be backed up to S3 or Glacier. Recovery is then very easy.

If you setup a more 'enterprise' environment then you can use multiple web application servers and maybe just one DB server with EBS mounted to it for files and data storage. You can script the replacement of web application servers if they become unresponsive and do lots of other things to build a highly resilient environment. 

We already have a ckan installation already up and running, plus i am not sure i understood the pricing policy from the link you mention. We are on a tight budget so i am not sure that we can afford it. 

Generally, it is worth thinking about cloud hosting infrastructure as part of the software stack and architect the entire solution to meet your needs. This includes Development environments, user testing, pre-production and production.

For the bilingual option, take a look at the Canadian Government portal as they have both French and English. Ian Ward from Datacats is the main person who has had a lot of experience with solving bilingual needs.

Yes, i have seen the canadian portal, but i am not sure this is what we want for us. It seems that they have one dataset for both languages but having different files for english and french. In our case we will upload monthly data, so eventually at the end of the year we are going to have (at least) 12 files on a dataset. Using the canadian way, this would go to 24 files, it might get messy.
In my opinion the best solution would be to have two distinct front ends, as if they were completly isolated from one another. Each one would contain only the English data and the other the greek data.

I'm guessing you know you can switch between language pretty easy, so your question is more around the user generated content being bilingual, or displaying two languages at once for some interface elements...

Are you talking about the combobox at the bottom of the front end, yes, i know that, but it is a poor translation. even the descriptions of what a dataset or an organisation is, are not yet translated

Take a look at the Greek translation here too:

https://www.transifex.com/okfn/ckan/

It is really easy to get setup as a contributor and ensure Greek is covered for all the main releases of CKAN. I'd suggest doing 2.2 through to 2.4. As each release of CKAN might introduce more fields you'll just want to stay on top of translations.

There is usually a call for these via the developer list prior to a release :)

Might give it a try when i can spare some time for it

Cheers,

Steven

Thank you for your info, Ilias

[Ian Ward]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:35 AM, Skaros Ilias <skaros...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> For the bilingual option, take a look at the Canadian Government portal as
>> they have both French and English. Ian Ward from Datacats is the main person
>> who has had a lot of experience with solving bilingual needs.
>
> Yes, i have seen the canadian portal, but i am not sure this is what we want
> for us. It seems that they have one dataset for both languages but having
> different files for english and french. In our case we will upload monthly
> data, so eventually at the end of the year we are going to have (at least)
> 12 files on a dataset. Using the canadian way, this would go to 24 files, it
> might get messy.
> In my opinion the best solution would be to have two distinct front ends, as
> if they were completly isolated from one another. Each one would contain
> only the English data and the other the greek data.

We decided to have a single portal with combined metadata because
that's much easier for us to maintain and keep in sync. Also many of
the metadata fields are not language-specific, so copying them back
and forth between sites when users make edits would be tricky. We also
like letting users switch languages without having to navigate back to
the page they were on.

Our latest approach is to use ckanext-fluent with ckanext-scheming to
support multiple dataset types with many custom fields, which is more
flexible (we can add more languages and types) and requires less
custom code in our extension for us to maintain than what's on
open.canada.ca right now.

Ian