The Chandler Project Blog

Next week, Jeffrey and I will be presenting on the Chandler Re-architecture Project at the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland, CA, hosted by Aspiration.

If you are in the area, we’d love to see you at the conference! (I will be updating this post with details as to which day we will be presenting.)

Update We will be presenting at 3PM on Tuesday Nov 18th. Here is the full schedule.

Below is the description for our sessions.

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Chandler is an open source Note-to-Self Organizer designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring, created by the Open Source Application Foundation.

Since our Preview release, we’ve had a number of users from a wide range of non-profits (ie. universities, other open source projects, summer camps, green technology, etc). Some are using Chandler individually, others have looped spouses and co-workers in to collaborate on projects and day-to-day tasks. You can read some of their stories here.

We will begin with a quick introduction to Chandler and demo what it is capable of today. However, the focus of the talk will be on newly started re-architecture work that will enable Chandler’s core note, task and calendar management workflows to become the anchor for a fully extensible and customizable information management platform.

To appeal to both everyday users of the software and developers with a technical interest in the project, our presentation will be two-part. First, we will walk through some user scenarios and then we will provide a technical overview of the re-architecture work we’ve been doing.

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Session 1: Extending Chandler: Chandler as a Confluence of Workflows

You can try out Chandler’s core information management workflows in the current 1.0 release: Collecting new information. Triaging tasks. Scheduling and reminders. List management and note-taking. Sharing and collaboration. Still, it was always our intention to build on these workflows to include document management, issue-tracking, and CRM (or to be even more specific, grant proposals, newsletters, and donor profiles).

In this session, we will walk through one scenario that demonstrates how Chandler’s workflow can be:

1. Extended to integrate new kinds of information management into the core workflows mentioned above.
2. Customized to meet the specific needs of your organization.

Session 2: Extending Chandler: Technical Overview of the Re-Architecture

Chandler’s re-architecture is focused on providing a framework with:

1. Events driven by Trellis
2. Strict separation of domain model, interaction model, and UI
3. Thorough testing of each layer without depending on higher layers
4. Thoroughly documented entry_points to make extension writing approachable
5. Doctesting so documentation is accurate and isn’t left for the last minute

The re-architecture project is still in its early days. The current documentation is available, and of course so is the source code.

Presenters: Jeffrey Harris, Developer and Mimi Yin, Product Designer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under OSAF, Public Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.