Common Media was pleased to co-sponsor iCamp CT in October at the University of Connecticut, Graduate Business Learning Center. Two of our team members came to the podium to share the fruits of CMI’s practical knowledge of Islandora – showcasing our experience and reaching out to the developer community.
First up was Gavin Morris, Digital Repositories Team Lead and part of the Common Media DevOps team, who addressed Islandora build challenges, issues and solutions with his presentation: “Automating Islandora Upgrations, Maintenance and Deploys.”
Gavin shared valuable insights into CMI’s current Islandora platform toolset trifecta – Virtualbox, Vagrant & Ansible – making the case for automating Islandora deploys and maintenance and using virtualization to maintain speed, flexibility and ultimately promote growth for Islandora sites and Fedora Commons repositories.
Following Gavin to the podium, Pat Dunlavey, Senior Drupal and Islandora Developer with CMI, explained in “Shaping Your Workflow” how to use the custom Islandora Webform module to improve flexibility and ease of use when submitting content to an Islandora repository. Pat suggests some intriguing use-cases:
- Crowd-source transcription of scanned handwritten letters.
- Crowd-source “I was there” content about a historical event.
- Design a curation workflow that ensures all repository content has passed through a controlled review process.
- Develop input templates that flexibly map user-friendly input forms to formal xml schema – casual users don’t need to understand your schema.
- …and more….
Pat points out that the only more-used module is Views – meaning that the Islandora Webform and its dozens of add-on modules are a prime resource for developers.
With previous trips to the Islandora CampBC in Vancouver, iConference on Prince Edward Island, NERDSummit and similar events, Common Media is an active and invested partner in the local and international open source software and developer communities.
