This site is based on the Django framework. The main functionality is in an app called 'core' and other apps provide support to that. All the custom code can be found in 'pombola'.
Python dependencies are specified in the 'requirements.txt' file. Most are standard Python packages but some are repositories.
Other dependencies are listed in 'conf/packages'. If you are on a Debian like system these are the packages you'll need to install.
Configuration is done by editing the values in 'pombola/settings/base.py'. Values which change between installations (eg dev and production) are set in the file 'conf/general.yml' (use the 'conf/general.yml-example' to get started). There is also a sample Apache2 config in 'conf/httpd.conf-example' which might be helpful.
When installing the system note that many additional files and directories will
be created in the data/ directory in the top level git repo checkout. These
include the 'media_root' for uploaded images, the virtualenv and various others.
All data is stored in the database, but some is copied into the search engine implemented using Haystack for full text searching.
Location searches are carried out using Google's geolocate tools, with calls being made to their API. These are cached after the first request.
Boundary data is taken from a MaPit service (an embedded app), this is used to find the constituency for a point and also to serve the KML boundaries used on the Google maps.