The idea of this project is to make a web-based front-end to PopIt for crowd-sourcing candidates for upcoming elections; it was used for YourNextMP in the UK for the 2015 General Election.
You can find a list of known issues to work on here:
These are prioritized in Waffle:
Make a new directory called yournextmp, change into that directory and clone the repository with:
git clone --recursive <REPOSITORY-URL>
Copy the example Vagrantfile to the root of your new directory:
cp yournextrepresentative/Vagrantfile-example ./Vagrantfile
Copy the example configuration file to conf/general.yml:
cp yournextrepresentative/conf/general.yml-example yournextrepresentative/conf/general.yml
Edit yournextrepresentative/conf/general.yml to fill in details of
the PopIt instance you're using.
Start that vagrant box with:
vagrant up
Log in to the box with:
vagrant ssh
Move to the app directory
cd yournextrepresentative
Add a superuser account:
./manage.py createsuperuser
Run the development server:
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
Now you should be able to see the site at:
http://127.0.0.1.xip.io:8000/
Go to the admin interface:
http://127.0.0.1.xip.io:8000/admin/
... and login with the superuser account.
If you want to create a PopIt database based on an existing live instance, see the "Mirror the live database into your development copy" section below, and follow those steps at this stage.
After logging in again, the only steps you should need to run the development server again are:
cd yournextrepresentative
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
SSH into the vagrant machine, then run:
cd yournextrepresentative
./manage.py test
Download the live database, and save the location in an environment variable:
./manage.py candidates_get_live_database
export DUMP_DIRECTORY="$(pwd)"
Assuming you have a local development instance of PopIt, change into the root of the PopIt repository, and run:
NODE_ENV=development bin/replace-database \
"$DUMP_DIRECTORY"/yournextrepresentative- \
candidates \
popitdev__master
... replacing candidates with the slug of your YourNextMP
PopIt instance, and popitdev__master with the name of your PopIt
master database in MongoDB.
Then set the maximum PopIt person ID by running:
./manage.py candidates_set_max_person_id
(This is a rough description at the moment; making YourNextMP fully generic is a work-in-progress.)
To use this code to collect informations about candidates in a new
jurisdiction, you should start by adding a new election application
under elections - you can use uk_general_election_2015 as an
example. You should then set ELECTION_APP in your general.yml to
the name of that application (not including elections.).
In that application, you should create a settings module which
defines ELECTIONS.
If you want to customize behaviour of YourNextMP for this jurisdiction, then you can do one of the following:
-
Override generic templates in your election application.
-
Add a urls.py and views.py and override and augment and of the generic URLs that you want to customize.
-
Some data and behaviour will need to be customized by adding functions or variables in
lib.pyin your election application.
You will also have to decide if you you want to create "party sets" or "post groups" for the elections you're supporting. These are potentially confusing, so here are some quick descriptions:
It's sometimes the case that there are different sets of parties available for different posts that are up for election. (For example, in the UK General Election, there are distinct registers of parties for constituencies in Northern Ireland and Great Britain.)
Each post can be in a particular "post group"; these are only used to group the posts on the party detail page for a particular election. (For example, in the UK General Election, it was useful to group posts on that page by whether they were associated with a constituency in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales.
FIXME: add details of translating the interface