django-periodicals

A Django application for periodical/magazine websites with fully cross linked indices on Periodical, Issue, Article, Author, Article Series and Tags. Provides full text search of article titles and descriptions. A complete set of templates are provided. A sitemap is also dynamically generated.

Documentation

The full documentation is at http://django-periodicals.rtfd.org.

Features

I developed django-periodicals to provide a searchable index for a printed/online magazine. I wanted all the meta data to be fully cross linked. So users can easily browse all articles for an author, all articles in an issue, all articles in a series/category, all articles tagged with a keyword and so forth.

I turned it in to a standalone application when I ported it to Django 1.5. Here are the features:

• Provides Django models for Periodicals, Issues, Articles, Authors, Tags and Links to external material.
• A full set of templates are provided including:
  • Individual Periodical pages with yearly indices.
  • Fully cross-linked indexes of Authors, Issues, Article Series, Tags, and Articles.
  • Search across Article titles and descriptions.
  • Tagging:
    • Per article.
    • Index pages per tag.
    • Tag cloud.
• Moderated user added links of blog posts and other web resources to each Issue and Article. Spam protection by reCAPTCHA and requiring approval by the admin. This feature can be disabled via setting.
• Django admin forms for data entry.
• Sitemap support.
• Support for Python 2.6, 2.7 and Django 1.5 and 1.6.
• Travis CI unit tests.
• See django-periodicals in action at Googility.

Quickstart

You can install from GitHub and try out a fully functional demo with data: :ref:`try-the-demo-project`.

Otherwise simply install from a package using pip which will install it's PyPi packaged dependencies.

pip install django-periodicals

Install two packages manually to get newer versions than are currently in PyPi:

$ pip install -e git://github.com/saschwarz/django-recaptcha.git#egg=django-recaptcha

$ pip install -e git://github.com/nemith/django-tagging.git@dev-django1.5#egg=django_tagging-dev

Install a search backend for use by Haystack. To start install Whoosh:

$ pip install Whoosh

settings.py

Add periodicals and the other applications it uses to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'haystack',
    'tagging',
    'captcha',
    'periodicals',
)

Configure your Haystack backend. Here is an example using Whoosh:

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.whoosh_backend.WhooshEngine',
        'PATH': os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)), 'whoosh_periodicals_index'),
        'STORAGE': 'file',
        'POST_LIMIT': 128 * 1024 * 1024,
        'INCLUDE_SPELLING': True,
        'BATCH_SIZE': 100,
    },
}

Configure your reCAPTCHA keys - only used when users add links to Articles or Issues:

RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY = "your-recaptcha-private-key"
RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY = "your-recaptcha-public-key"

urls.py

Choose a URL prefix at which to base the application:

...
import periodicals

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^periodicals/', include(periodicals.urls)),
)

Management Commands

Create the application's database tables:

$ python manage.py syncdb