Ushahidi 3

What is Ushahidi 3.x?

Ushahidi is an open source web application for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. It helps you to collect info from: SMS, Twitter, RSS feeds, Email. It helps you to process that information, categorize it, geo-locate it and publish it on a map.

Ushahidi 3.x is the next iteration of this tool, rebuilt from the ground up -- not only the code but the way in which we think about users interacting with mobile and social data. Crowdsourcing strategies have come a long way in the five years Ushahidi has been around and we've been fortunate enough to learn a lot from our global community.

Should I use Ushahidi 3.x for my new project?

Sorry, not yet.. Probably in 2014. I'd love to say you should, but right now its not complete, we're not even close to ironing out all the bugs.

I'm a developer, should I contribute to Ushahidi 3.x?

Maybe.. We're still in heavy development, many architecture questions haven't been answered yet, many that have will still change.

If you just want to fix a few bugs, or build a prototype on Ushahidi.. you're probably better helping out on Ushahidi 2.x right now.

If you're keen to help build something awesome, and happy to get deep into the core workings.. then yes. Jump on board..

More info

Getting started

System Requirements

To install the platform on your computer/server, the target system must meet the following requirements:

PHP version 5.3.0 or greater
Database Server
- MySQL version 5.5 or greater
- PostgreSQL support is coming
An HTTP Server. Ushahidi is known to work with the following web servers:
- Apache 2.2+
- nginx
Unicode support in the operating system

Getting the code

You can get the code by cloning the github repo.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ushahidi/Lamu

You need to use --recursive to initialize and clone all the submodules. If you've already cloned without submodules you can already initialize (or update) them but running:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Installing

Create a database
Copy application/config/database.php to application/config/environments/development/database.php
Edit application/config/environments/development/database.php and set database, username and password params

return array
(
  'default' => array
  (
    'type'       => 'MySQLi',
    'connection' => array(
      'hostname'   => 'localhost',
      'database'   => 'lamu',
      'username'   => 'lamu',
      'password'   => 'lamu',
      'persistent' => FALSE,
    ),
    'table_prefix' => '',
    'charset'      => 'utf8',
    'caching'      => TRUE,
    'profiling'    => TRUE,
  )
);

Copy application/config/init.php to application/config/environments/development/init.php

A note on urls, docroots and base_url

The repository is set up so that httpdocs is expected to be the doc root. If the docroot on your development server is /var/www and you put the code into /var/www/lamu then the base_url for your deployment is going to be http://localhost/lamu/httpdocs/

If you're installing a live deployment you should set up a virtual host and make the DocumentRoot point directly to httpdocs.

If you can't use a vhost you can copy just the httpdocs directory into your docroot, rename it as needed. Then update the paths for application, modules and system in index.php.
Edit application/config/environments/development/init.php and change base_url to point the the httpdocs directory in your deployment
Copy httpdocs/template.htaccess to httpdocs/.htaccess
Edit httpdocs/.htaccess and change the RewriteBase value to match your deployment url

Create directories application/cache, application/media/uploads and application/logs and make sure they're writeable by your webserver

mkdir application/cache application/logs application/media/uploads
chown www-data application/cache application/logs application/media/uploads

Install the database schema using migrations

./minion --task=migrations:run --up

Logging in the first time

The default install creates a user 'demo' with password 'testing'. This user has admin privileges. Once logged in this user can create further user accounts or give others admin permissions too.

Configuration

Base config files are in application/config/.

You can add per-environment config overrides in application/config/environments/. The environment is switched based on the KOHANA_ENV environment variable.

Routes are configured in application/routes/default.php. Additional routes can be added in per-environment routing files ie. application/routes/development.php.

Release Notes

What to expect in the latest Alpha (aka v3.0.0-alpha.3)

There's a bunch of new things in this release, you can search and edit posts, edit site settings, manage users, pull messages from SMS and turn them in to posts. One of the simplest but most major improvements: you can log in, register and log out! And you can access the public site without logging in at all! As with the previous release you should still be able to get V3 installed, create and delete posts, view a list of posts and drill down to individual post pages

What's not working:

Uploading images on posts
Showing custom form field on posts
User profile in the workspace menu still display dummy content
Posts still display dummy images
Permission checks in the UI - we check permissions thoroughly throughout the API however this isn't always reflected in the UI. This means you'll sometimes see a UI for editing something (ie. users) but be unable to actually load an data or unable to edit the data.
Related posts - always shows the most recent 3 posts
Media - We're just using fake images at the moment, there's no way to upload new ones
Custom forms - these exist in the API, but there's no UI for managing them.

How do I get admin access?

The default install creates a user 'demo' with password 'testing'. This user has admin privileges. Once logged in this user can create further user accounts or give others admin permissions too.

Authorization (aka. why does it keep asking me to 'Authorize This Request'?)

When logging in you still get a standard OAuth authorization screen. This is because our UI is using the API directly, and the standard authorization flows. We've improved this a lot since last release and we're working on getting rid of the authorize screen completely for the default UI client.

How do I pull in SMS or Email

This is working but the config is still in code. The main config is covered in application/config/data-providers.php. We'll be publishing a detailed guide on how to do this soon!

Extras

Vagrantfile

We've included a Vagrantfile and puppet manifests to help build a quick development box. Install Vagrant, then run vagrant up to get started!

Travis-CI

Unit and functional tests are run automatically by Travis-CI. See .travis.yml for config details.

Testing

We use PHPUnit for unit tests, and Behat and Mink for functional testing. You can install the Behat, Mink, PHPUnit and other required packages using Composer. Just run composer install

Behat and PHPUnit will be installed to ./bin at the root of the repository.

Create a behat config file by copying application/tests/behat.template to application/tests/behat.yml. Edit the file to set your deployments base url. Run the tests as follows:

./bin/behat --config application/tests/behat.yml
./bin/phpunit -c application/tests/phpunit.xml

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