The content management system for the Public Lab research community, the plots2 web application is a combination of a group research blog of what we call "research notes," and a wiki.

It features a Bootstrap-based UI and a variety of community and attribution features that help the Public Lab community collaborate on environmental technology design and documentation, as well as community organizing. Originally a Drupal site, it was rewritten in 2012 in Ruby on Rails, and has since extended but not entirely replaced the legacy Drupal data model and database design.

Some key features include:

• a Markdown-based research note and wiki editor
• wiki editing and revision tracking
• tagging and tag-based content organization
• email notification subscriptions for tags and comments
• a barebones search interface
• a user dashboard presenting recent activity

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##Simple installation with Cloud9

This is a quick installation for use with the cloud environment https://c9.io - for more standard, full instructions, see below.

1. If you have a GitHub account, visit https://c9.io and log in with the GitHub button.
2. Fork this repository to your own GitHub account, creating a yourname/plots2 project.
3. Name your project, then enter yourname/plots2 in the "Clone from Git or Mercurial URL" field, and press Create Workspace
4. In the command line prompt at the bottom of the page, type . ./install_cloudnine.sh and press enter.
5. Enter your username when prompted, and run rails s -b $IP -p $PORT when it's done.
6. You're done! Go to the URL shown!

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Our production application runs on mysql, but for development, sqlite3 is sufficient.

• Mac OS X: Macs ship with sqlite3 already installed.
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install sqlite3
• Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS: sudo yum install sqlite -- you may need sqlite-devel as well.

If you are just developing and don't plan to do work with image uploading, you may not need the following, but otherwise:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick ruby-rmagick

Install rvm for Ruby management (http://rvm.io)

curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Note: At this point during the process, you may want to log out and log back in, or open a new terminal window; RVM will then properly load in your environment.

Ubuntu users: You may need to enable Run command as a login shell in Ubuntu's Terminal, under Profile Preferences > Title and Command. Then close the terminal and reopen it. You may also want to run source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm to load RVM.

Then, use RVM to install version 2.1.2 of Ruby. (v1.9.3+ should also work):

rvm install 2.1.2

Ruby dependencies, or Gems, are managed with Bundler.

gem install bundler - if it's not already installed, but it should be in a basic RVM ruby.

You'll also need bower which is available through npm, part of node.js.

This wiki page from the nodejs repository has comprehensive and up to date installation guides for many systems.

Once NPM is installed, you should be able to run:

sudo npm install -g bower

##Installation

Installation steps:

1. In the console, download a copy of the source with git clone https://github.com/publiclab/plots2.git.
2. Enter the new 'plots2' directory with cd plots2.
3. Install gems with bundle install --without production from the rails root folder, to install the gems you'll need, excluding those needed only in production. You may need to first run bundle update if you have older gems in your environment from previous Rails work.
4. Make a copy of db/schema.rb.example and place it at db/schema.rb.
5. Make a copy of config/database.yml.sqlite.example and place it at config/database.yml
6. For development, we've included a prebuilt sqlite database in the development.sqlite.example file. Make a copy of this and name it development.sqlite, and the above example database config is already set up to connect to it. Copying it ensures that changes to your local database won't be added your commits. If you are using another database, you can run bundle exec rake db:setup to set it up, and bundle exec rake db:seed to populate it with initial dummy data.
7. Install static assets (like external javascript libraries, fonts) with bower install
8. Start rails with passenger start from the Rails root and open http://localhost:3000 in a web browser.
9. Wheeeee! You're up and running! Log in with test usernames "user", "moderator", or "admin", and password "password".
10. Run rake test to confirm that your install is working properly. For some setups, you may see warnings even if test pass; see this issue we're working to resolve.

For some, it will be necessary to prepend your gem-related commands with bundle exec, for example bundle exec passenger start; adding bundle exec ensures you're using the version of passenger you just installed with Bundler. bundle exec rake db:setup, bundle exec rake db:seed are other examples of where this might be necessary.

##Testing

Run tests with rake test. We are extremely interested in building our out test suite, so please consider helping us write tests!

##Bugs and support

To report bugs and request features, please use the GitHub issue tracker provided at https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues

For additional support, join the Public Lab website and mailing list at http://publiclab.org/lists or for urgent requests, email [email protected]

##Developers

Help improve Public Lab software!

• Join the '[email protected]' discussion list to get involved
• Look for open issues at https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues
• We're specifically asking for help with issues labelled with help-wanted tag
• Find lots of info on contributing at http://publiclab.org/wiki/developers
• Review specific contributor guidelines at http://publiclab.org/wiki/contributing-to-public-lab-software
• Some devs hang out in http://publiclab.org/chat (irc webchat)

##First time?

New to open source/free software? We've listed some "good for first timers" bugs to fix here: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/labels/first-timers-only

We also have a slightly larger list of easy-ish but small and self contained issues: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/labels/help-wanted