Extended Family

The Vision

I wanted to create a community centered around something that most, if not all, people are involved in. That is a family, and this includes an extended family. On this iteration of Decidim, a family unit can organize all aspects of their lives and schedules, including:

Organize all aspects of family events (Thanksgiving, Christmas, holidays)
Manage household chores
Vote on evening/weekend activities (Games, movies, etc.)
Share photos (Sporting events, holidays, weekend trips, etc.)
Propose leadership/structural changes
More

My Experience

Installation of Decidim seemed straightforward, but I needed a bit of help with two issues that I found to be not very well-documented. I ultimately got enough help and clarity from the community’s matrix.org chat-room, but feel that I should have been able to solve these issues from documentation or previously reported issues. The two issues were as follows:

Postgres Setup

While following the installation steps on a fresh Ubuntu 22.04.1 install, I encountered the following error: could not change directory to "/home/user": Permission denied from the command $ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE USER decidim_app WITH SUPERUSER CREATEDB NOCREATEROLE PASSWORD 'thepassword'

Ultimately, I had to change permissions with $ chmod og+rX /home /home/user which was an easy fix, but isn’t documented anywhere.

Webpacker

Regardless of installing on a fresh Ubuntu install or OSX, the next error was inevitable: Webpacker can't find decidim_dev.css...

There is quite a bit of documentation on this, in the form of a GitHub repo issues (8528 and 10981), neither of which solved my problem(s). The following terminal commands did:

$ rm -rf node_modules public/decidim-packs package-lock.json
$ npm install
$ bin/rails assets:precompile
$ bundle exec rake assets:precompile
$ bundle exec rake webpacker:compile
$ rm -rf public/decidim-packs
$ rm bin/yarn yarn.lock
$ bundle exec rake decidim:upgrade
$ bundle exec rake webpacker:compile

Note: The above commands can likely be condensed.

Babel

After fixing the webpacker issue, a minor issue presented itself, noted and solved here.

What Worked

Creating, migrating, and seeding went flawlessly: $ bin/rails db:create db:migrate db:seed

I was able to get Decidim working on both OSX and Ubuntu.

The admin panel is straight-forward, intuitive, and user-friendly. Great for those with no coding background.

Installing the two modules recommended from the test (Decidim::AlternativeLanding and Decidim::DecidimAwesome) was easy. As simple as adding to the Gemfile and bundling in the terminal.

I went ahead and added the comment and blog modules as well, as I feel these would be well-utilized in a family-based organization.

What Didn't Work

Sending Email

I tried setting up email via several different SMTP servers to no avail. To bypass this, I changed the number of days grace period a new user has to verify their account in the /config/initializers/decidim.rb to config.unconfirmed_access_for = 1000.days

Assemblies

I was unable to delete every assembly in the admin panel. There were always at least two assemblies in the view, and I was unable to find them in the admin panel.

Steep Learning Curve for Customization

There appears to be a lot of legwork to fully customize a Decidim install, and a lot of learning is required to know which elements are being changed and where to change said element. This is good for non-developers, but it often feels like extra steps to change an image or text.

Production

Deploying my Decidim application to both Fly and Heroku failed. On Heroku, I had to downgrade to stack-20, and deploying still failed. As this was outside of the scope of this test, I did not pursue it, but it wasn’t as straightforward as I’d expect. My next steps would be to check the documentation.