A long time roommate is participating in the UN-informed project. The idea of the project is to create a database of all the various UN resolutions so that it becomes possible to quickly find everything about a given topic. Amazingly enough there is nothing like that at the moment. So its seemingly impossible to find out what resolution is still currently relevant, what resolution even has any legal value, who has ratified the resolution etc. The final database will become an invaluable tool for NGOs, researchers and even governments around the world. However most of the people on the project have a background in economics, politics and law.
She asked me if I can help them out with building their IT infrastructure, mainly getting them away from the excel sheets they are using right now and onto a proper RDBMS with an administration interface and more importantly a frontend for end users. Ideally this would not be a one man show however. For one I suck at frontend work (and I do not particularly enjoy it either), the time I can dedicate to this is obviously limited and obviously its never good to have one guy doing it all (bus factor and all).
So far we are working out a DB schema (note for now I am using ENUM's not sure if that will stay this way in the final design). For the next step I am thinking of using symfony admin generator together with Doctrine to generate a first draft of the admin interface. I do not have experience with the admin generator, so I am not sure how easily custom tools can be integrated (we have a few ideas to make it easier to select the proper tags for example), so in the end we might have to move away from the admin generator.
Anyways, is anyone interested in joining in to help out?
The link to your drop box is incorrect!
Bah, how most annoying. I expected the URL's in the dropbox web interface to be unique, but for some reason the URl's to folders are session context sensitive, while files are not. So I am now pointing to a zip of the entire directory. Includes a png of the schema, the source file for mysql workbench and a keynote and pdf version of their original requirements document.
Using symfony 1.2 with Doctrine is a good idea. :-)
The new admin generator which is based on the new form system is very customizable. But there are some pitfalls as the documentation is not complete. You need to read the sources and the best way is to create your own admin theme because there is always a thing you miss. But on the other hand that's the good thing about the admin generator: You can easily change everything.
In our company we are currently working on a pugin providing an "advanced admin generator theme" and additional form widgets for example to be able to display values plain (optionally depending on credentials). Next week we will add some AJAX magic to provide better association of related records.
This will all become open source, so maybe you can benefit from it or maybe we can even help with creating the project.
Ah.. little side note: I also created an I18n-Plugin for symfony 1.2 which allows to translate all interface content via admin modules. This will also be published very soon under MIT license..
Good front ends are, in my experience, proof of a solid and continuing communication flow between a bunch of relevant people; if this sounds Agile-ish, that's no accident.
Being a UN- and NGO-related project, I can imagine people wanting to use all sorts of oddball/outmoded kit to access un-informed.org; concepts like "graceful degradation" are going to be your Very Best Friends.
What exactly do you like about the symfony admin generator? I've done a couple of prototypes using Symfony, but the code hasn't (yet) lived in that form long enough to see production.
How can I help? Email me.
For now the main thing I want to achieve with the admin generator is "rapid prototyping". As in quickly getting some sort of interface up and running so that the un-informed guys get a better idea. But also a quick way for them to add some data, so that we can start experimenting with some queries for the frontend.
Another topic that I will have to look at later is how to best handle importing their current Excel sheets .. but thats another topic.
Which IT roles would be helpful ?
Well right now the main thing is development. Especially frontend development, since I suck at that. They are hoping for a search interface similar to kayak.com, where you enter a search criteria, and then you get a result list with filters that adapt dynamically to the result list. Aside from this they will probably also need some help on the system administration side of things, another area where I suck.
