The Computer Aided Management System is a database-driven web-based tool to help manage events, the first of which being the Mill Road Winter Fair in Cambridge, UK (MRWF, here simply referred to as the Fair).
Its first purpose is to allow a set of organizers to share contact details of all the fair's participants in an address book, i.e. organisations, volunteers, members of the committee etc. Each organizers has a user name and a password and is granted a set of rights to work on some parts of the database.
People can also apply via public online forms to take part in the fair, for example if they want to have a stall or publish an advert in the fair's programme. In this case, no user account is required but people have to enter their names and e-mail addresses. Organizers can then review the applications, edit the programme and generate invoices.
There is also an API to extract the public programme information (HTTP/XML interface) so websites and smartphone applications can produce it in any electronic format; see the Mill Road Winter Fair website for example.
This is powered by Django, which is basically an awesome software framework to create database-driven websites written in Python.
These instructions are to set-up a self-contained Django development environment, which is slightly different from hosting it on a web server. The main difference being that SQLite is easier to use for development, but is less performent than MySQL or PostgreSQL which are preferred on the public web version. The Django framework provides an abstraction layer so the code remains the same regardless of the SQL database flavour in use. Also, static files are handeled with the Django development server here whereas Apache would typically be used on the production web server.
It is also worth mentioning that a separate set of fictional data is used for development purposes, so no privacy issues get in the way. It helps making a clear difference when switching between the development and production versions. The development data can be initialised via Django fixtures.
Note
It is recommended to use a Linux system for many practical reasons. If you haven't got Linux installed on your computer, an easy alternative is to run it in a virtual machine. For example, you can download and install Virtual Box and Ubuntu.
You will need these things installed on your Linux system:
- Python v2.7 recommended, v2.6 should also work. Run
python -Vto check what you have already installed. - pysqlite, a Python interface to SQLite 3. If you can run
python -c "import pysqlite2"without an error message then you already have it. - Django v1.4, the latest v1.5 should also work.
Warning
You must read the Getting Started page and especially the Quick install guide and database setup pages on the Django documentation website.
Clone the cams and mrwf repositories, then create a file with your local settings based on the boilerplate:
cp local_settings_sample.py local_settings.py
Note
This mrwf repository repends on the cams repository. The principle
is to keep things specific to the MRWF in mrwf and out of cams which
can be reused for other events. It also makes the design much neater. In
fact the mrwf now has many features that could be migrated into cams
with some little extra effort.
In your local_settings.py which is imported by the main settings.py,
edit the BASE_DIR with the path to where you cloned the repositories. Now
run this command to initialise the database:
python manage.py syncdb
Answer 'yes' to create a superuser account, with the name and password of
your choice as well as your e-mail address.
You should now all be set to run the development server:
python manage.py runserver
Then in your favourite browser, open this URL: http://localhost:8000. Enter your user name and password, this should work!