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KORA Introduction

You’re probably looking at this page right now and wondering, “What’s the bare minimum I need to read to understand KORA?” Well, let us tell you. We highly recommend that all users read through the introductory materials. They’re pretty brief and they’ll help you wrap your mind around what KORA is and how you can best interact with it.

After that, it depends on who you are. KORA has different features for project managers (the people who are helping organize and plan a project) and data-entry personnel (the people who are going to be entering digital records into the KORA database). We’ve broken down our tutorials to reflect the needs of these user groups. So, after reading the introductory materials, go out and experiment with KORA. Try to do stuff. And when you get stuck, review the tutorials you need.

KORA Introduction - Wiki

KORA is a database frontend/repository developed by MATRIX. While it has evolved from a number of projects such as Repos and Project Builder, which were developed by a variety of programmers at MATRIX, the current generation of KORA is a complete rewrite and redesign by Brian Beck, Matt Geimer, Anthony D'Onofrio, and Joe Deming and shares no code with the previous generations.

The purpose of KORA is to allow users to store, represent, and retrieve data in a variety of user-defined formats. It is written in PHP 5 with a MySQL database backend. As of its 1.0.0 release, it requires PHP version 5.1.3 or greater and MySQL version 5.0.3 or greater. While it was designed for and tested on Linux/UNIX servers, it should be compatible with running on Windows® systems as well.

This document is intended to provide explanation of the technical workings of KORA and the principles and assumptions underlying its code. It should allow a programmer to understand the KORA data model, how to get data out of KORA from front end websites, and how to develop new controls and features for KORA.