tschortsch/ckanext-discourse

CKAN + Discourse

How it works

A new topic is created in the Discourse forum (in a designated Category) for each dataset, organization, and group in the CKAN site. This will happen automatically the first time someone visits the CKAN dataset, org and group page and starts a discussion. Topic reply counts are also displayed in the appropriate listing pages.

This plugin also supports ckanext-datarequests and ckanext-showcase.

Setup Discourse

1. Install Discourse.

   The recommended way is to use the official Docker image following these instructions, but read below first.

   You will need to install Docker first.

   Heads up! There is an extra step, not described in these instructions, before bootstraping your application to allow the Discourse comments to be embbeded on different domains. Edit the containers/app.yml file and add the last line (- git clone https://github.com/TheBunyip/discourse-allow-same-origin.git) to this snippet:

    ```yml
   
    hooks:
      after_code:
        - exec:
            cd: $home/plugins
            cmd:
              - mkdir -p plugins
              - git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git
              - git clone https://github.com/TheBunyip/discourse-allow-same-origin.git
    ```
   

   Make sure to keep the existing spaces and indentation.

   Also make sure to set up emailing properly and to create an admin account as described in the instructions.

2. Create a new Discourse user. This will be the user that will create the topics on Discourse for each CKAN dataset. To create a new user, go to "Admin" > "Users" > "Send Invites" and enter an email address. You may want to name the user so that its plainly evident its a bot (e.g. databot) (TODO: admin, mod?)

3. Create a new Discourse Category. This will contain all topics created for each CKAN dataset. To do so, go to the homepage and click on "Categories" > "New Category". Enter a name and optionally the slug for your category. After creating a Category, go to the Category page and take note of the URL. You will need this to setup ckanext-discourse.

4. Configure Embbedding. Go to "Admin" > "Settings" > "Embedding". You must fill up the following fields:

   • embeddable hosts: Add the domain (without the http:// bit) of your CKAN instance (e.g. data.myorg.com)
   • embed by username: Name of the user that you created on step 2 (e.g. portaldatabot)
   • embed category: Name of the category that you created on step 3 (e.g. Open Data Portal Datasets)

5. Configure Oneboxing. Go to "Admin" > "Settings" > "Onebox". Be sure the CKAN domain is in the whitelist. Oneboxing allows users to create a Onebox preview from CKAN URLs. To create a CKAN onebox in Discourse, just insert a CKAN URL in its own line and one will be created automatically. (Demo here)

Setup CKAN

1. Install ckanext-discourse. Activate your virtualenv and run:

    git clone https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-discourse.git
    cd ckanext-discourse
    python setup.py develop
   

2. Add the discourse plugin to the enabled plugins on your ini file:

    ckan.plugins = ... discourse
   

   If discourse embedding is desired for ckanext-showcase and ckanext-datarequests, be sure to add the discourse plugin after those plugins (i.e. ckan.plugins = ... showcase datarequests discourse)

3. Add the following options as well:

    discourse.url=http://discourse.example.com
    discourse.username=ddhdatabot
    discourse.ckan_category=c/data-discovery-hub-datasets
    discourse.debug = false
   

   discourse.url: the url of your Discourse instance. Be sure to specify the full url. https is supported.

   discourse.username: the discourse username created earlier.

   discourse.ckan_category: appended to the discourse.url to get the full URL of the discourse category JSON. In this example, the webpage for the Discourse CKAN category is http://discourse.example.com/c/data-discovery-hub-datasets. The plugin automatically adds the ".json" file suffix (i.e. http://discourse.example.com/c/data-discovery-hub-datasets.json) to get the JSON file required to talk to the Discourse API.

   discourse.debug: instead of inserting the JS code to embed a Discourse topic, debugging information is displayed instead. This is useful when troubleshooting, as a misconfigured plugin will "spam" your discourse instance with topics that may annoy your users with false-positive discourse notifications.