Loaning Library

##Starting to update

Starting to update for Django 1.7

Introduction

This is a simple loaning library meant to address two needs that I have noticed for my personal home library. First, I frequently loan books to people and then lose track of where my books are. Second, I frequently receive gifts as books but because I have many (thousands) I frequently receive doubles. This home catalog will allow me to keep track of where my books are and will allow other people to see if I already own a book.

This is made for Django 1.3.1 and Python 2.5 < x < 3. It uses sqlite. A sample database will be available.

Notes

This was mostly as a learning experience in Django, as I am more comfortable using Bottle. This was fun and interesting - I had explored Django a year or two ago and moved on to other frameworks, but I think this one has a lot of potential.

I think I touched on everything in the walkthrough. I also did a bit of work in templating. The design is silly, but functional enough. I enjoyed the mix and match vibe I got from extending the standard DetailView class; that was a last minute addition.

Current support is only for books. This was a conscious choice to simplify the development of the site, in an effort to release early and often. A certain amount of refactoring is to be expected before the next version.

Static Files and The Admin Interface

I had some problems with Static files and the admin site. I think it is due to the fact that I upgraded from an older version of Django in the middle of working on this project.

Users

I made an active choice not to use the built in userbase as borrowers. The reason for this is that at this point, this is not a particularly social site. I am not expecting the borrowers of items to want to log in. I expect to use both the front end and the back end exclusively myself.

Roadmap

This is not what I would consider a release candidate. Here is what I would like to include moving forward to get it to a place where it would be a useful tool for general consumption.

• we are not really doing any data sanitization
• genre should be tags and allow multiples
• searchable
• wishlist
• ISBN integration
• multiple media (dvd, video games, cd, etc.)
• app for scanning barcodes

The Smartphone App

This would benefit from a native smartphone app that scans barcodes to give you the information on your book or media that you are adding to or signing out from your catalog. To this end, I am examining django-piston to create a REST API that the app could use to interact with django, and ZXing to handle the actual scanning and interpreting of the barcodes. Proof of concept scanner is easy to set up.

I think this is where success would happen. A lot of people have smart phones and being able to do a signout in 10 seconds without using a computer is a good goal to work towards.