[ALA-Portal] [ala-portal] Purpose of generic repositories

[Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado]

Dear Alex:

First of all, welcome to our community Alex. You'll receive in short an
invitation to slack where we discuss these topics.

Meanwhile, I'll try to respond you.

Many LA portals use directory the ala generated artifacts
(ala-collectory, ala-hub, ala-bie, and so on). If you don't need to
customized grails code or similar, I recommend to follow this option. In
Spain we are currently using these repos/artifacts.

Using these approach you can also customize your portal via a custom
branding (html/css/js).

Some LA portals use some customizations for the collectory, and hubs,
and use some custom fork of the generic-collectory and/or other modules.

We did this in the past, but preferred to come back to the ala artifacts
and to generalize our code customizations and send back to ALA code base.

Both options use the collectory-plugin that is where the main collectory
code is and is shared (similar occurs with biocache-hubs, bie-plugin,...).

In summary, to start I recommend the first option without any doubt.

Also I recommend to have a look to this new toolkit:
https://github.com/living-atlases/la-toolkit
that tries to facilitate all these tasks while using the ala-install &
ansible and gives initial setup recommendations. You can test a
non-functional demo here:
https://toolkit-demo.l-a.site/
or a presentation with screenscats here:
https://datos.gbif.es/others/la-toolkit-gbif-presentation-2021.html

Please don't hesitate to ask us any other similar question (ideally via
slack).

BR,

Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado
Technical Coordinator - Living Atlases Community

El 8/10/21 a las 18:11, Alex Melbourne escribió:
> Hey,
> 
> I'm working on an attempt to deploy a living atlas at Royal Botanic
> Gardens, Kew and I have some confusion around the use cases of the
> repositories that are prefixed with `generic'.
> 
> As part of the demo deployment that can be installed via Ansible the
> collectory component is the one run by the mainline Atlas of Living
> Australia.
> 
> https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia/ala-collectory
> <https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia/ala-collectory>
> 
> However, if you leave the variable undefined then it ends up being assigned
> the name of the generic version.
> 
> artifactId: "{{ collectory_app | default('generic-collectory') }}"
> 
> Looking at this repository it seem almost identicial but not the same.
> 
> https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia/generic-collectory
> <https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia/generic-collectory>
> 
> In the case of the collectory, my understanding is that the actual work is
> done with a plugin that both packages make use of so aside from it being a
> little behind there isn't a vast difference between the generic package and
> the... official (for lack of a better term) one.
> 
> Is there some advice on which should be modified in a new deployment? The
> NBN Atlas has only forked `ala-collectory' but the atlas that's part of the
> Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI) has forked both.
> 
> Does this advice generalise to other repositories listed as generic?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Alex
> --
> Lead Science App Developer
> Digital Revolution
> Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
> 
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