Infomaki goes Open Source!
Written on May 6, 2009 by Michael Lascarides
This first release is a “throw it over the side and see if it swims” release. To get it running, you will need to have a decent familiarity with the Ruby on Rails programming framework. It has spotty-to-nonexistent test coverage, a bit of vestigial code, and possibly some dependencies on a RubyGem or two that we probably forgot to package. Also, there are some non-user-friendly features in the admin, such as the fact that it’s possible to delete screenshots that are in use, causing errors.
If you’re not the adventurous type, you might want to wait a couple of weeks for a more novice-friendly release. But there’s been definite interest in the software, so those who want to have at it can have at it!
We’ll soon be adding documentation to the Sourceforge site to accompany the source code, but here’s the Quick Start version for getting it running on your local machine:
- Have Ruby on Rails 2.2+ running, along with the database of your choice.
- Check out the Infomaki source code from our Subversion repository or by downloading the .zip file (see the Sourceforge project site for details).
- Update the config/database.yml file with your local database settings.
- From the command line, change the directory to the root of the Infomaki application and run “rake db:migrate” to build the database structure.
- Install the required RubyGems (running “rake gems:install” from command line should do the trick).
- Start the Rails server (type “script/server”). If all goes well , you should see the project home page at http://0.0.0.0:3000/
- To create content, go to http://0.0.0.0:3000/initiatives and log in with username “admin@admin.com” and password “rootroot”.
Hopefully this will be of use to a couple of people. We welcome suggestions and code patches. Have fun!
Filed in: Open source, Ruby on Rails, User testing, infomaki.
Awesome! Thanks Michael, I’ve been looking forward to this!
[...] This post was Twitted by daphnelin – Real-url.org [...]
overall was an easy install. there seems to be a people script in the migration directory that it doesn’t like as the schema does not have a people table. perhaps this is a layover from previous schema?
i should note that i did a svn co of trunk since there didn’t appear to be tags
Can you give us a brief introduction/reminder to what infomaki does, and why we might want it? Or is that in another blog post somewhere I’ve forgotten; can you link to it here?
I’m potentially interested!
[...] Infomaki goes Open Source! – The New York Public Library’s usability testing tool is now released Open Source under the GNU General Public License. [...]
@eby You’re right about the wayward migration… there’s a reference to a “people” table that got deleted. Will fix later today. Also, “trunk” is all there is right now.
@Jonathan The purpose of the tool is laid out in the announcement blog post and we followed up with some stats and a progress report.
This usability tool looks very promising in terms of the web metrics data it captures. Can Infomaki also capture average response time or average time for call to action?
Thanks,
Sze
[...] n Infomaki goes Open Source! | NYPL Labs [...]
[...] Infomaki has been developed by the people over at NYPL Labs, and just a few days ago finally went open source (requires Ruby on Rails 2.2+). One interesting thing about this software is how flexible it is to [...]
@sze Sure does! Captures time in milliseconds between load of a question and the click to respond, then displays the average time next to the result in the admin.
@everybody If anyone’s downloaded and played with it, can y’all please do me a favor and disable the Google Analytics? We meant to do that first, but it slipped the net. There’s a version 0.1.1 patch on the Sourceforge site, or you can just remove the code from line 8 of app/views/shared/_analytics.html.erb
Thanks!
First a big hats off to the NYPL Labs for publishing Infomaki as Open Source! It only took about 10 minutes and a couple of gem installs to get it running locally, very impressive.
I’ll try to post further observations when we get to use it on a client project.
Cheers
Thanks everyone – if you like Infomaki, please leave a comment here in support: http://matc.mellon.org/nominate/the-new-york-public-library/infomaki
Thank you for making this open source. Several of us from the Toronto Public Library web team (engaged in a big redesign/usability project ATM) came across it yesterday while looking for information on an unrelated topic.
I am now going to learn enough Ruby On Rails (current knowledge==nil) to get it running so we can experiment. :)
I see the latest trunk has the vendor, thanks.
Also probably too late but probably would have been nice to not have database.yml in trunk but instead a database.yml.sample that way it comes up as not being under source control when it is customized rather than modified.
I removed the line 8 manually but the about layout seemed to want me to just remove the analytics template link all together. Will that affect anything other than the google analytics?
Thanks for making this available! I’m trying to install this, but when I do ‘rake db:migrate’, I get the following error:
Any suggestions?
Yikes, we missed that one! Will check in a fix shortly. In the meantime, you can just remove all mentions of the people table from the file /db/migrate/20090221202048_create_users.rb.
This will get you through the db rake process.
# drop_table :people
end
def self.down
drop_table :users
# create_table :people do |t|
# t.timestamps
# end
end
Please host your project on Github instead of SourceForge. It will make patching code for your project easier and there is a very strong Rails community on there already.
We recently used Infomaki to conduct usability testing with one of our clients, with excellent results. I have posted an article about this on our blog here:
http://www.volkside.com/2009/07/usability-test-with-infomaki/
Thanks again for releasing this great tool as open source!
This is really great, thank you all guys.
I have a question. Is it possible to create more than one project at the same time with Infomaki? In our university we want to conduct several tests.