README

Welcome to the Willet repo!

Here's a very brief, top-level explanation of our GAE application. This is basically the same as the README file.

Files

• appengine_config.py: Can't remember what this does. I'm pretty sure it's used for gaesessions.

• urls.py: Crawls the repo looking for urls.py files (only looks in dirs specified within util/consts.py). As it crawls, it builds a list of { uri -> handler } and memcaches it so we don't need to build it frequently.

       If you ever need to refer to a uri within the code, you should 
       call url( 'HANDLER_NAME' ) and it'll return a relative uri.
  
       You can call URL within a template file too!
  

Dirs

• apps/: Familiar with the Django framework? If not, wikipedia it! All code code goes in here. Each bit of modularized code is a Django 'app' and has it's own folder.

     We use MVC within each app folder. 
         M = models.py
         V = views.py
         C = processes.py 
  
     Any uri handlers need to be added to urls.py so that we can build all
     uris and memcache them! If you add a new app, you need to add it to 
     util/consts.py list of apps so that the uri builder knows to grab
     it's uris.
  
     Every subfolder under apps/ needs to have an __init__.py.
     Otherwise, things break!
  
     HTML files for views are stored within each app's dir under
     templates/. Some apps have additional files (ie. not just .html)
     within templates/. Essentially, any file that is dynamically
     served would go under templates.
  

• gaesessions/: This isn't currently in use. If you want to have server-side sessions in GAE, you'll need to use it.

• mapreduce/: This is GAE's mapreduce lib. Unfortunately, it needs to be kept in a top level folder. It is used to compute the analytics.

          There is svn metadata in the mapreduce folders because the project
          is updated frequently and you can grab the updates directly
          using svn.
  

• pipeline/: Future versions of mapreduce use the Pipeline lib.

• static/: All static content is served from here. Right now, it's a bit messy.

• util/: Random helpers and libs go in here.

• w3c/: Privacy policy etc stored here. You'll never need to go in here ever!

Yamls

GAE is controlled using yaml files. The syntax is really straight-forward!

• app.yaml: Controls the WHOLE APP! The most important part is 'application' - this field controls the deployment location of your app.

        Not much more will ever need to be changed here.
  

• backends.yaml: Controls GAE's backends processes. Currently only used for analytics.

• cron.yaml: Controls all cron jobs. Mostly everything is turned off right now.

• handlers.yaml: Controls the uris available for our app. This file shouldn't ever need to edited unless you've added some special static files

• index.yaml: Tells GAE which db indexes it needs to build and serve. Only edit if GAE complains about a missing index when you deploy.

• mapreduce.yaml: Controls the mapreduce settings.

• queue.yaml: Inits the task queues for running processes out-of-band.

Files

Under /apps, you'll find a bunch of folders like /app, /user, /admin, /order, etc.

Within each folder, there will probably be files for:

actions.py - Actions logged for analytics reporting. We do all our own analytics (no outsourcing to Mixpanel anymore).

models.py - Models for DB

processes.py - Mostly used for POSTs and backend processing.

views.py - All templates are rendered here.

/templates/ - All HTML and, sometimes, dynamically served CSS and JS will go in here.

"Apps"

Under /apps, you'll find /app - this means "application for a store owner". We currently have 3 "apps" for store merchants. All 3 "apps" inherit from the top-level "App" model.

Referrals / Invite for a Gift

Deprecated

Buttons

No longer managed really, 16 stores have it installed.

SIBT (Should I Buy This)

Our main focus!