Question About Future Plans For Installer
My wife works at a small museum with about four staff currently. They are mostly very non technical people. She asked me to look into FOSS options to replace PastPerfect and that's how I came across CollectiveAccess. I think the program would meet their needs but I think getting it setup and maintained will be a challenge for them. It may even for me but even if it wasn't I work six days a week and can't offer much time for them. I know that paid support is offered and I personally think it would be worth their money but at the same time may I ask if there is a longterm goal to have a more normal installer such as a .exe for Windows or .sh for Linux rather than the more manual install process that exists ?
Comments
We'll likely add Docker images with the next release. But there are no plans for a Windows MSI installer, or anything of that nature. If someone wants to work on that we'd encourage it, but it's not something we will do without external participation.
Hi simmonz, Seth and team,
I do have a pair of developers here with me in France, we had a very long run handling the cataloguing norms here, with a dedicated profile (Joconde) interesting only french museums (way too much centralized country, but that's it).
As some universities start to use CollectiveAccess in their end studies for artwork management (Bordeaux III, Montpellier III, Orléans-la-Source...), I had some talks with teachers : they use tiny VS for their curses, but some students wanted to try by their own.
I've seen lately that MAMP (mac & win), that I ported to french a long time ago in our galaxy, still works great ; under Windows installs in C:\MAMP and in Mac in /Applications/MAMP, so htdocs are easily to be found. I'm thinking of an installer, that requires MAMP to be already installed (so no MAMP included) and deploys the last released version from https://github.com/collectiveaccess/providence/releases
It would creat a proper setup.php and open in the browser the installation page, and that's all. But this idea is more targeted here to CA discover & learning in universities than to be used as large collections db installation tool...
Don't know if that helps, but if it works good and stays simple, we'll post updates here. Actually it's in 2023 Q2/Q3 goals here, support for other AMP packages (XAMPP, WamppManager, EasyPHP and other) is not a goal for now.
It would be very helpful if someone packaged it that way and supported it!
Give me some weeks, and that would be done, the idea is here to keep it simple s. and so maintain it for the long run.
"We'll likely add Docker images with the next release. But there are no plans for a Windows MSI installer, or anything of that nature. If someone wants to work on that we'd encourage it, but it's not something we will do without external participation."
Docker would work great so that is awesome news. Also the consulting fee wasn't as hard of a sell as I thought it would be. My wife loved the demonstration section of the site and is looking into some local government grants to help cover the cost so if all goes well they should be looking into CollectiveAccess later in the year. Exciting times !
Hi Seth,
Have a check on https://github.com/ideesculture/setup_collectiveaccess_windows/releases
@Simmonz : this setup.exe is for demonstration and education purposes, it does not answer your needs of proper consulting, you have Whirl-i-Gig team for that. Best to your wife's institution project !
Gautier