Development: Overview
Overview
What does Ushahidi Do?
Ushahidi is a tool for collecting, managing, and visualizing data.
Data can be collected from anyone, anytime, anywhere by SMS, email, web, Twitter, and RSS.
Posts can be managed and triaged with filters and workflows.
Data can be viewed in many ways: on a map, in a list, or as a visualization.
Who is Ushahidi For?
Anyone can use Ushahidi, but traditionally it has been a tool used by Crisis Responders, Human Rights Reporters, and Citizens & Governments (such as election monitoring or corruption reporters). We also serve environmental mappers, asset monitoring, citizen journalism, international development, and many others.
Technical Specifications
Development stack
TODO: Add info about v4.
Ushahidi 3.x was built on a PHP stack: dependencies are managed with composer, we’re using Kohana 3 but phasing that out, and we’ve isolated the core logic of the platform standalone Entity and Usecase classes.
The user interface of Ushahidi 3.x is now a separate app (the client) built purely in JS, HTML + CSS using AngularJS, Single SPA and a collection of other libraries, with a build pipeline using gulp and Webpack.
What’s new (and improved)?
Dependencies are properly managed and easier to update or replace needed.
We’re using our own API to build the app, it gets first class support.
You can work on just the UI without delving into the API code
Modern libraries mean they’re still being supported, we don’t have the burden of supporting legacy libraries ourselves.
Code is easier to customize
code is more structured making it easier to find what you want
code is doesn’t repeat itself so a change can be made in one place, not need to be copied everywhere else
UI is isolated to the client, allowing work on just the UI without having to delve into the API code