Announcing CKAN 2.0 | ckan - The open source data portal software

Today we are very happy and excited to announce the final release of CKAN 2.0. This is the most significant piece of CKAN news since the project began, and represents months of hectic work by the team and other contributors since before the release of version 1.8 last October, and of the 2.0 beta in February. Thank you to the many CKAN users for your patience – we think you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait.  CKAN 2.0 is a significant improvement on 1.x versions for data users, programmers, and publishers. Enormous thanks are due to the many users, data publishers, and others in the data community, who have submitted comments, code contributions and bug reports, and helped to get CKAN to where it is. Thanks also to OKF clients who have supported bespoke work in various areas that has become part of the core code. These include data.gov, the US government open data portal, which will be re-launched using CKAN 2.0 in a few weeks. Let’s look at the main changes in version 2.0. If you are in a hurry to see it in action, head on over to demo.ckan.org, where you can try it out.  CKAN 2.0 introduces a new sleek default design, and easier theming to build custom sites. It has a completely redesigned authorisation system enabling different departments or bodies to control their own workflow. It has more built-in previews, and publishers can add custom previews for their favourite file types. News feeds and activity streams enable users to keep up with changes or new datasets in areas of interest. A new version of the API enables other applications to have full access to all the capabilities of CKAN. And there are many other smaller changes and bug fixes.  The first thing that previous CKAN users notice will be the greatly improved page design. For the first time, CKAN’s look and feel has been carefully designed from the ground up by experienced professionals in web and information design. This has affected not only the visual appearance but many aspects of the information architecture, from the ‘breadcrumb trail’ navigation on each page, to the appearance and position of buttons and links to make their function as transparent as possible.  Under the surface, an even more radical change has affected how pages are themed in CKAN. Themes are implemented using templates, and the old templating system has been replaced with the newer and more flexible Jinja2. This makes it much easier for developers to theme their CKAN instance to fit in with the overall theme or branding of their web presence.  Organizations make it possible for individual departments, bodies, groups, etc, to publish their own data in CKAN, and to have control over their own publishing workflow. Different users can have different roles within an Organization, with different authorisations. Linked to this is the possibility for each dataset to have different statuses, reflecting their progress through the workflow, and to be public or private. In the default set-up, Organization user roles include Members (who can read the Organization’s private datsets), Editors (who can add, edit and publish datasets) and Admins (who can add and change roles for users) ... CKAN 2.0 provides users with ways to see when new data or changes are made in areas that they are interested in. Users can ‘follow’ datasets, Organizations, or groups (curated collections of datasets). A user’s personalised dashboard includes a news feed showing activity from the followed items – new datasets, revised metadata and changes or additions to dataset resources. If there are entries in your news feed since you last read it, a small flag shows the number of new items, and you can opt to receive notifications of them via e-mail.  Each dataset, Organization etc also has an ‘activity stream’, enabling users to see a summary of its recent history ... CKAN’s powerful application programming interface (API) makes it possible for other machines and programs to automatically read, search and update datasets. CKAN’s API was previously designed according to REST principles. RESTful APIs are deservedly popular as a way to expose a clean interface to certain views on a collection of data. However, for CKAN we felt it would be better to