CloudSearch vs NarraFirma

CloudSearch is a flexible plugin that allows you to leverage the search index power of Amazon CloudSearch in your WordPress site. To use this plugin you’ll need an Amazon Web Services account. Attention: Amazon CloudSearch is a paid service and will require a credit card. Before you can start using CloudSearch, the plugin needs to be activated and configured. Activate the plugin, then go to the menu “CloudSearch -> Settings” (you can find this menu in the sidebar of your WordPress admin panel). Fill the form data: Enter Amazon access key ID, Amazon secret access key and Amazon region for your account (look for “Security Credentials” in your Amazon console to retrieve these data) Enter your CloudSearch index search endpoint and the domain name (I suggest to create the CloudSearch index before you start the plugin configuration) Schema settings Other settings IMPORTANT NOTES WITH RELEASE 2.0.0: * At least WordPress 4.4 version mandatory (for WP_Term support) * Changed APIs output from an array of IDs to an array of object composed by the entity ID and the entity type Minimum requirements: WordPress Version 4.4 PHP Version 5.3 Amazon Web Services account with CloudSearch enabled Usage Go to CloudSearch -> Settings Enter your Amazon access key ID, Secret access key and the Amazon region where you have created the CloudSearch index Enter a Search endpoint and the Domain name. Get these info in your CloudSearch dashboard in AWS Console Choose post types, custom fields and custom taxonomies that you want to export to the CloudSearch index Set up other settings or leave defaults Save settings. Go to CloudSearch -> Manage Click the action Create index, Run indexing and Sync all documents. Between every action wait until the Status field is Active, then go on with the next task After these operation your index is ready, now you can search documents in your CloudSearch index Links: Author’s Site

NarraFirma is companion software to the textbook Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry. Participatory Narrative Inquiry is a form of Participatory Action Research in which groups of people share and work with their stories of personal experiences to understand each other and to make collective sense of complex issues and situations. You can use it to help the people in your community or organization discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people. What is NarraFirma? It’s a checklist. NarraFirma provides practical guidance as you work, with questions for you to answer, recommendations based on the conditions you describe, activities that help you make decisions, and just-in-time advice. It’s a journal. NarraFirma helps you keep careful records about what happened in your project, and it gives you places to reflect on what happened. This reminds you to keep learning as you work, and it helps you to document your project for future reference. It’s a kiosk. NarraFirma helps you collect stories, on-line and/or off-line, based on question forms you design (with sample questions you can copy). Because story collection is integrated, there is no need to export or import data. It’s a workstation. NarraFirma helps you explore and interpret patterns in your data (stories and answers to questions about stories), creating annotated visualizations you can use to make sense of the stories you collected. Why choose NarraFirma? It’s portable. You can install NarraFirma anywhere, as a WordPress plugin or a Node.js web application. Web hosting is inexpensive, popular, and well supported. You can also install NarraFirma on your local computer and use it off-line. (Whichever installation method you choose, we strongly suggest that you set up SSL security on your web site before collecting or entering confidential or important information. Many hosting providers can help you with this task.) It’s a team player. With NarraFirma your team can work on projects together in real time without having to hand files back and forth. You can plan your project, collect stories, discover patterns, and reflect on what you’ve learned – together. It’s an open book. NarraFirma is open source software. So if you have a question about how something works, you can just look at the source code to find out. If you need the software to do something it can’t do, you can add new functionality yourself or ask someone else to add it. It works in the real world. One NarraFirma installation supports multiple projects, forms, data sets, and reports. Why? Because real-life story projects are rarely simple or predictable. So go ahead and make a mess. NarraFirma is ready for it. Donations We have spent a lot of time developing NarraFirma. We appreciate donations, and will use them to keep working on it. You can donate at PayPal. Need some help? I offer training in the use of NarraFirma and consulting for PNI projects. If you are interested, check out my web site at cfkurtz.com, or send me a note at cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com.