View source for Custom Productivity Workflows with Chandler

Facilitated by Jeffrey Harris, Developer and Mimi Yin, Product Designer, [http://http://chandlerproject.org/ Chandler].

[http://www.chandlerproject.org/ Chandler] is an open source Note-to-Self Organizer designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring, created by the [http://www.osafoundation.org/ Open Source Application Foundation]. 

Since our [http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2007/09/11/preview/ Preview] release, we've had a number of users from a wide range of non-profits (ie. universities, other open source projects, summer camps, green technology, etc). Some are using Chandler individually, others have looped spouses and co-workers in to collaborate on projects and day-to-day tasks. You can read some of their stories [http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/UserStories here]. 

We will begin with a quick introduction to Chandler and demo what it is capable of today. However, the focus of the talk will be on newly started re-architecture work that will enable Chandler's core note, task and calendar management workflows to become the anchor for a fully extensible and customizable information management platform.

To appeal to both everyday users of the software and developers with a technical interest in the project, the session will be two-part. First, we will walk through some user scenarios and then we will provide a technical overview of the re-architecture work we've been doing.

'''Part 1''': Extending Chandler: Chandler as a Confluence of Workflows
You can try out Chandler's core information management workflows in the current [http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/08/08/chandler-10/ 1.0] release: Collecting new information. Triaging tasks. Scheduling and reminders. List management and note-taking. Sharing and collaboration. Still, it was always our intention to build on these workflows to include document management, issue-tracking, and CRM (or to be even more specific, grant proposals, newsletters, and donor profiles).

In this session, we will walk through one scenario that demonstrates how Chandler's workflow can be: 
# Extended to integrate new kinds of information management into the core workflows mentioned above.
# Customized to meet the specific needs of your organization.

'''Part 2''': Extending Chandler: Technical Overview of the Re-Architecture
Chandler's re-architecture is focused on providing a framework with:
# Events driven by [http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/Trellis Trellis]
# Strict separation of domain model, interaction model, and UI
# Thorough testing of each layer without depending on higher layers
# Thoroughly documented [http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#entry-points entry_points] to make extension writing approachable
# [http://www.python.org/doc/lib/module-doctest.html Doctesting] so documentation is accurate and isn't left for the last minute

The re-architecture project is still in its early days.  The current documentation is [http://people.osafoundation.org/%7Ejeffrey/rearch_documentation/ available], and of course so is the [http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler2/trunk/ source code].