Silver Chips Online

Silver Chips Online is an award-winning school newspaper from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD. Further specifications for things like data models, site maps, and feature wishlists are stored in the boards and issues. Note that while the intent is to keep this framework generic as to support news sites for different organizations, parts may be hardcoded until a full fork and release.

Getting Started

It's recommended to use the supplied Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml. Simply clone the repository and run docker-compose up and the site will be up and running.

Manual Installation

You have to install Python 3+, pip, sass, and pipenv. The version of sass that's installable via gem is outdated and will not work. If using postgres, the postgres server development libraries need to be installed (postgresql-server-dev-12 on Ubuntu).

Environment setup

1. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/mbhs/silverchips.git.
2. cd into silverchips: cd silverchips.
3. Run pipenv --three install --dev to install the environment. If this doesn't work, run pipenv lock --pre --clear beforehand.
4. Run pipenv shell to enter the new environment.
5. Make migrations and apply:
   • python manage.py makemigrations
   • python manage.py migrate
6. Make an appropriate secure_settings.py in the silverchips folder. An example can be found in silverchips/secure_settings.py.postgres_example.
7. If using postgres, you can load the sco.sql database dump into the database. If not, you can load a fixture: python manage.py loaddata core/fixtures/recent.json. Note that the database dump is preferred since the fixture is missing many things, such as permissions.
8. Run the server: python manage.py runserver.
9. Visit in browser: localhost:8000.

Organization

Django code is organized broadly into models, which store data in the database and you can interact nicely with in Python; views, which perform server-side logic on models data, possibly making changes or organizing data for display; and templates, which render view results to HTML. For more information, see the excellent official Django tutorial.

This code is organized into three main Django apps and a number of auxiliary scripts. The apps are:

• core: Shared functionality between all aspects of Silver Chips Online. Models live here.
• home: Public-facing functionality that any user can see when they load the site.
• staff: Private functionality that only Silver Chips staff accesses to administer the newspaper.

Advanced

Creating Fixtures

Simply run the command python manage.py dumpdata --natural-foreign --natural-primary -e contenttypes.contenttype -e auth.permission > core/fixtures/recent.json.

Development Notes

The core/fixtures/testing.json fixture and sco.sql database dump has a superuser with username admin and password password.