What is a ready to use wordpress CMS template for serving open datasets?

Question

I am trying to serve certain open datasets in tabular form , converted to Google fusion tables/ spreadsheets etc to any interested audience. I am not a web developer but am knowledgeable enough to create and serve a wordpress site through its CMS. Is there an out of the box solution specifically created for dealing with distribution of open datasets which will give me basic features like adding tags/ creating lists/ groups etc and which will work without too much of troubleshooting.

An alternative stack that is easy to use with a ubuntu LAMP installation is also fine. My primary goal is to make it easy for many non-geeky folks to view and browse the datasets which have descriptions attached to them.

Answer 1

Data.gov has open sourced it's code, which combines WordPress for the front end with CKAN for the open data catalog. The code is available via Github--for commenting, downloading, or submitting modifications.

This code will continue to evolve with user-driven updates to the functionality needed.

This will be part of the U.S. ongoing contribution to the Open Government Platform, as well, which is a collaboration between India, Canada, Ghana, and the U.S. and currently is available as a native Drupal, and a Drupal + CKAN capability. The source code is being made accessible via Github.

(Disclaimer: I am the Evangelist with Data.gov)

Answer 2

WordPress supports both categories and tags out of the box.

With a standard WordPress installation you could post links to your datasets in blog posts (one per post) with the content of the post being a description of the dataset.

Categories could be used to broadly group your datasets (e.g., health, education, military), while tags will give you finer control over keywords specific to particular datasets (e.g., vietnam, iraq, afghanistan). WordPress also has a general search function which would allow a user to search for words or phrases of interest (e.g., "military budget").

You can use Wordpress' built-in upload function to upload a document although you might get more flexibility from uploading your datasets to a separate location and manually placing hyperlinks to your datasets in posts as required.

Choose a Wordpress theme that allows your users to easily browse the post archives, with a layout appropriate for your requirements and I would say you could get a very pleasing solution with little or no customisation.

Answer 3

I'm researching a similar open data storage/delivery problem. We'd like to hook an open data repo into a new CMS site, likely Wordpress, while avoiding having to roll our own CKAN environment. Our goal is provide datasets to developers who would then create various apps and projects based on the datasets.

There's a tool called DKAN that's basically the CKAN platform squished into Drupal and it looks promising, but probably overkill.

Also looking into Github or Google Drive as open data repositories (the "regular" kind of repository not the strict version-control type, though we'd get version-control with Github for free) and exposing lists and links on the CMS site via API.

Looking at Github, the organization and team features are only adequate for managing, "categorizing", and organizing a hierarchy of data sets. The familiarity with which many folks have of Git and Github combined with our developer-heavy audience and potential app/project output makes this a solid option.

Google Drive, on the other hand, is much more robust from an organizational perspective, but doesn't give us much else beyond the Google App ecosystem basics.

We expect to heavily customize our CMS and aren't afraid to try new things regarding open data storage, but moving straight to CKAN seems like a gnarly first move.