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Overview

Topic Type: 
Information

Just to give a quick overview of this project, since it might not be obvious at first glance:

FarmOS is a web-based farm management and record keeping system I've been working on. It is open source, so you can download the code and set it up on your own server, make changes, contribute back to the project, etc.

The code is currently available on GitHub: http://github.com/farmier/farm

I will eventually move the canonical repository to drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/farm

Current status

It's still pretty early in the development. I've been working on the data architecture primarily, with a minimum UI for editing the data. What this means is that I've been defining entity types, their fields, and their relationships. So right now it is capable of the first (and most important) step: recording. It does not yet provide any analysis or data summarization features, but those will start to grow over time, once there is some real data to play with.

Relationship to Farmier

Farmier (http://farmier.com) is a "software-as-a-service (SaaS)" business that I started alongside this code. It grew out of the websites that I had been building for small farms, and includes a lot of features for managing a website, sending newsletters, maintaining a blog, etc etc. It also includes the modules that are in the FarmOS distribution. My hope is that by providing a "hosted" version of FarmOS, it will make it easier for less tech-savvy farmers to use, and at the same time provide me with some income to continue development. So Drupal Farm is a generalized open source package of modules and code, and Farmier is a more specific and hosted implementation of that, with some other stuff for website management, etc.

Getting involved

If you're interested in getting involved with testing or development, please let me know! I tried to design everything to be as flexible as possible, with the hope that others would see the value and pick it up and run with it. I'll try to post more information here soon, but if you have any questions, let me know!

eco.matt's picture

Hi Michael, I've just come across this project :) I haven't even looked at an installation or any of the code/modules yet, but as a long-time drupaler myself, a fan of open source ecology, and also as someone increasingly interested in food and farming (of the CSA's and permaculture variants) this is definitely a project I'm interested in learning more about and possibly contributing to.

Cheers!

Matt Sorenson

m.stenta's picture

Thanks Matt! It would be great to have you involved! I do most of the planning/task management on the drupal.org issue queues (they work really well for maintaining Drupal modules), but the repos are also mirrored on github.com/farmOS. I'm also usually hanging out in IRC #farmOS on freenode. Love to have you in the discussion!