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

The stack

Back-end: Linux, PHP, Apache/Nginx, MySQL or PostgreSQL

Front-end: AngularJS, Single SPA, Javascript, Html, CSS. Built with NodeJS, Gulp.js and Webpack. Using Leaflet for mapping, and a collection of other frontend libraries