Django-FAQ

This is a simple FAQ application for a Django powered site. This app follows several "best practices" for reusable apps by allowing for template overrides and extra_context arguments and such.

Features

Question Headers can be created that can be used to group related questions into sections.

Questions can be "protected" in which case they are only presented to authenticated users.

There are some saved FAQs in a fixture named initial_data.json that provide the example apps with some questions to view when you bring them up for the first time. These FAQs provide additional notes about installing and using django-faq.

There is a SubmitFAQForm defined that you can use to allow site visitors to submit new questions and/or answers to the site administrator for consideration. All submitted questions are added as "inactive" and so it is up to the administrator to edit, activate or discard the question as well as set its' sort_order field and slug to reasonable values. You can enable users to post questions by setting FAQ_ALLOW_QUESTION to True in your settings. Accordingly you can enable users to suggest an answer to the question they are posting by setting the FAQ_ALLOW_ANSWER to True in your settings. It is also possible to prevent unregistred users from posting questions by setting FAQ_REQUIRE_AUTH to True. Note: if you don't set these variables at all the default settings will allow unregistred users to post questions with no posibility to suggest an answer.

Requirements

Django 1.3, Python 2.5 or greater.

Installation

1. pip install -e git+git://github.com/chielteuben/django-faq.git
2. Add "faq" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

3. Wire up the FAQ views by adding a line to your URLconf:

   url('^faq/', include('faq.urls'))

4. Run python manage.py syncdb (Make sure you've set up the DATABASES in your django settings)
5. (Optional) Set FAQ_REQUIRE_AUTH or FAQ_ALLOW_ANSWER (see features) in your settings file.

If you want to customize the templates then either create a 'faq' directory in your projects templates location, or you can also pass along custom 'template_name' arguments by creating your own view wrappers around the 'faq' app views. I show how to do the latter in the 'example' project included - look at the views.py file to see the details.

If you'd like to load some example data then run python manage.py loaddata faq_test_data.json

Example Site

There is a stand-alone example site in the example directory. To try it out:

1. Install django-faq (see above).
2. Run python manage.py syncdb (This assumes that sqlite3 is available; if not you'll need to change the DATABASES setting first.)
3. If you'd like to load some example data then run python manage.py loaddata faq_test_data.json
4. Run python manage.py runserver and you will have the example site up and running. The home page will have links to get to the available views as well as to the admin.

After logging into the admin you will notice an additional question appears in the FAQ. That question is "protected" and therefore not presented to non-authenticated users.

The capability to submit an FAQ is available and works whether or not you are a logged in user. Note that a staff member will have to use the admin and review any submitted FAQs and clean them up and set them to active before they are viewable by the end user views.