Publications Portal

A web portal written in Python3 with Django to store, retrieve and display the details of academic publications of the members of an institute.

Features

These are described in the file DBMS_requirements.pdf

Directory Structure

  publications_portal
  ├── accounts
  │   ├── __init__.py
  │   ├── apps.py
  │   ├── forms.py
  │   ├── managers.py
  │   ├── migrations
  │   │   ├── 0001_initial.py
  │   │   ├── 0002_auto_20161016_1628.py
  │   │   ├── 0003_auto_20161016_2039.py
  │   │   ├── 0004_auto_20161017_0204.py
  │   │   ├── 0005_auto_20161019_0903.py
  │   │   ├── 0006_auto_20161019_0906.py
  │   │   └── __init__.py
  │   ├── models.py
  │   ├── templates
  │   │   └── accounts
  │   │       ├── dashboard.html
  │   │       ├── email.html
  │   │       ├── email_subject.txt
  │   │       ├── login.html
  │   │       ├── password_reset.html
  │   │       ├── password_reset_complete.html
  │   │       ├── password_reset_confirm.html
  │   │       ├── password_reset_done.html
  │   │       ├── signup.html
  │   │       └── signup_successful.html
  │   ├── urls.py
  │   └── views.py
  ├── creator
  │   ├── __init__.py
  │   ├── apps.py
  │   ├── forms.py
  │   ├── migrations
  │   │   ├── __init__.py
  │   ├── templates
  │   │   └── creator
  │   │       ├── action_successful.html
  │   │       ├── add_field.html
  │   │       ├── add_form.html
  │   │       └── add_publication.html
  │   ├── urls.py
  │   └── views.py
  ├── DBMS_requirements.pdf
  ├── db_dump.sql
  ├── ERD.pdf
  ├── manage.py
  ├── portal
  │   ├── __init__.py
  │   ├── apps.py
  │   ├── forms.py
  │   ├── migrations
  │   ├── static
  │   │   └── portal
  │   │       ├── css
  │   │       │   └── style.css
  │   │       ├── images
  │   │       │   ├── google.png
  │   │       │   └── logo.png
  │   │       └── js
  │   ├── templates
  │   │   └── portal
  │   │       ├── 404.html
  │   │       ├── author.html
  │   │       ├── base.html
  │   │       ├── department.html
  │   │       ├── field.html
  │   │       ├── index.html
  │   │       ├── institute.html
  │   │       ├── publication.html
  │   │       ├── publication_list.html
  │   │       ├── publisher.html
  │   │       └── search.html
  │   ├── templatetags
  │   │   ├── __init__.py
  │   │   └── widget_type.py
  │   ├── urls.py
  │   └── views.py
  ├── pub_portal_schema_create.sql
  ├── publications_portal
  │    ├── __init__.py
  │    ├── settings.py
  │    ├── urls.py
  │    └── wsgi.py
  └── Schema.pdf

 

Running the portal

  The host computer must have Django 1.10 and python3 to run the portal. To simply run the portal for demonstration purposes, execute

python3 manage.py runserver

In the publications_portal directory. This portal uses MySQL as it's database. The SQL script to setup the databse is given in pub_portal_schema_create.sql and the DB Dump is given in db_dump.sql.

To create the schema, run mysql -uroot < pub_portal_schema_create.sql.

To create DB from dump, run mysql -uroot < db_dump.sql.

The portal can be used with a production server such as Apache or Nginx.

Django apps

The portal has been modularised into the following Django apps:

• accounts: For managing user accounts/profile creation and login features
• creator: For creating/adding new objects like Author, Publisher, Department, Institute, Publication, etc.
• portal: The main app, this is used to provide a view to all the auditing and browsing capabilities of the portal.

UI/UX

The UI/UX of the portal is consistent and highly usable, with clean and clear visual cues and straightforward ways of performing tasks with complete and informative error messages which tell the user exactly what went wrong.

Links

The important links in the portal are given below:

• /: Index
• /login/: Login
• /signup/: Signup
• /dashboard/: User dashboard
• /add/*/: Add an entity (Institute, Publication, etc.) to the portal
• /*/id: Display the detail of the entity (Institute, Publication, etc.) with the given id.