 <p>Yes, to develop a CKAN extension you have to install CKAN from source.</p> <p>We're working on a new tutorial for writing CKAN extensions, you can see the draft version of the tutorial here: <a href="https://github.com/okfn/ckan/pull/943" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/okfn/ckan/pull/943</a></p>