Google Summer of Code 2010 IDEAS

by Gavin Treadgold

There are many aspects of Sahana that need to be customised to suit a specific country before Sahana can be effectively deployed. There is a need for a system that allows experienced Sahana administrators to customise and configure Sahana for a particular country. These setting and database entries then need to be saved and implemented in the administration section of Sahana to enable easy customisation of a Sahana server to suit a particular countries requirements. This may involve the creation of a configuration file that contains all database inserts (e.g. to create regions, set name preferences, forms of ID, preferred units, currency etc).

Additional thoughts by Glenn Pearson

Sahana “Central” might want to create its own large data repository, of pre-formatted, pre-vetted data (but in some cases automatically refreshed from sources), from which the new administrator could pick and choose using a wizard.

For example, for the Location Hierarchy and Country List, there could be a map-based interface to quickly select/prune geographic areas of interest from a “gazetteer” database. (Current, for Location Hierarchy you can define more levels to the hierarchy than you may need, and then hide levels above or/below those of interest when a disaster actually occurs. But there's no way to hide siblings on the fly, e.g., show country A but not country B.)

For more, see our discussion about some of our experiences in configuring and customizing Sahana content for a particular project, including coding standards and data sources.