schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

["Tom Hoffman" <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

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