I've had a few conversations with people lately about extending or customizing the demographic information in SchoolTool. People seem to be a bit confused, so let me try to clear up the situation.
* SchoolTool currently has a very, very simple set of demographic data about people. We know it is too simple for general production use. One reason to keep it simple is for forward compatibility -- it is easier to add things than remove them. * Given the interest in this subject, I'll get a draft up of a SchoolTool 1.0 demographic/contact info schema up for discussion before Christmas. This will be based on several international of standards documents and various example forms I've collected. * We won't be making it easy for non-programmers to customize demographics in SchoolTool 1.0 beyond a few text fields that can be given custom labels (probably). It would be easy to give users just enough rope to hang themselves (i.e., data loss, serious upgrade/migration problems or database corruption) if we do this wrong. It would be nice to have this someday, but not by April. * Extending SchoolTool demographics programatically (i.e., writing some Python) is not that hard. This is a complete working example: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~schooltool-owners/schooltool/sla/files/158?file_id=demographics-20080508130152-tmte8lfzemedgfxb-8362 Basically, you have to keep in your mind the distinction between SchoolTool as a product we ship and support and SchoolTool as an open source platform. We can't currently support extensive end user customization as a product feature. SchoolTool demographics should be extensible for a developer able to support his own changes and take care to write tests and try new SchoolTool revisions out before deploying them. Hope that clears things up a little. --Tom _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
