Ushahidi Developer Meetup

Juliana Rotich
Aug 31, 2010

Following the successful deployment of Ushahidi in Kenya during the constitutional referendum 'Uchaguzi', and the community meetups held every month at the ihub, the developer community in Kenya came together at the ihub yesterday. The main reason for coming together was to learn from long time coder Jason Mule, and developer Linda Kamau. Ushahidi dev meetup Jason explained the Kohana framework, a php framework that follows the MVC style of object oriented programming and how Ushahidi utilizes it. He demystified perceptions around plugin development. It may seem difficult to write extensions or plugins at first, but with an understanding of the framework, events and filters, it becames easier for the developers to grasp how they can add functionality to Ushahidi. During the meetup, Linda Kamau went into more detail, giving the attendees a better sense of how to create a plugin. Mikel stopped by to highlight some of the ideas he and the MapKibera team had, to view their wishlist, check out this link. Ushahidi dev meetup For more information on how the plugin architecture, the plugin architecture screencast by Caleb Bell and David Kobia is quite instructive and useful. An example of a plugin developed with the new architecture is the Cloudvox plugin which allows people to call to report an incident. The next meetup is scheduled for October 28th 2010, Kenya based developers are welcome to join us again. Pics from the meetup are up on this flickr set.