Fest Management System

This is a generic Content management system made specifically for the purpose of handling the websites of college fests. It is written in Django and uses basically a Bootstrap based UI.

Prerequisites

Database

Install sqlite3 for development

• Windows: Steps : http://www.sqlitetutorial.net/download-install-sqlite/
• Mac OS X: Mac ships with sqlite3 already installed
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install sqlite3
• Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS: sudo yum install sqlite

python-pip

Install pip for python3

• Windows: pip is already installed if you're using Python 2 >=2.7.9 or Python 3 >=3.4
• Mac OS (via easy_install): sudo easy_install pip
• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python3-pip
• Fedora/CentOS: sudo yum install python-pip python-wheel

Virtual Environment Setup

Windows

1. Setup virtual environment with pip install virtualenvwrapper-win
2. Then create a virtual environment for your project: mkvirtualenv nameofyourproject
3. The virtual environment will be activated automatically and you’ll see “(nameofyourproject)” next to the command prompt to designate that.
4. If you start a new command prompt, you’ll need to activate the environment again using: workon nameofproject .

Linux

1. Virtualenv is available on PyPI, we can install it with the pip command: pip install virtualenv
2. Then create a virtual environment for your project: virtualenv --python=python3 nameofproject
3. Log into the virtualenv created: source nameofproject/bin/activate

Deployment

1. Clone the repository with git clone git@github.com:ghoshbishakh/festcms.git
2. Enter the directory using cd festcms
3. Copy festcms/settings.py.example to festcms/settings.py
4. Enter any arbitary key in the SECRET_KEY field in settings.py
5. To setup mail server, enter the details in email testing section of settings.py
6. Ensure that you have python3 set as default. You can do this by alias python=python3
7. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all dependencies
8. Run migrations using python manage.py migrate
9. Run server with python manage.py runserver
10. Ok you are all set! Visit http://localhost:8000 in your browser

Setting up feedback form

1. Create a superuser account with python manage.py createsuperuser, create your credentials.
2. Go to http://localhost:8000/admin and enter your credentials.
3. Create a new form in the forms section to your desire, by the name feedback and publish it.
4. You're done. You can now test the form at http://localhost:8000/forms/feedback.
5. You could check for submissions or make changes to the form via forms section in the admin panel.
6. You could create any other form in a similar way.

Configuring the unified navbar

1. Login the admin panel and create entries in the Navbar Entries section as per your requirement.
2. Load and use the navbar tag if required in any of your custom pages.

How to send Newsletters

1. Login the admin panel and click on the Newsletters section.
2. Create a new newsletter to your liking and save it.
3. Now in the Newsletter section presented, mark the letters to be sent.
4. Choose the action Send email from the Actions menu and click Go.
5. This sends the marked Newsletters to subscribed users.

Setting up email templates and how to use them

1. Create HTML(.html) and text(.txt) based templates for mail with the context as per your requirements.
2. Place both the HTML and text based files in festflow/templates/email_extras directory.
3. Now these templates could be used anywhere within the application by using the send_mail_template method of email_extras.utils package. Eg. Suppose we have example_mail.html and example_mail.txt as our text based and HTML based templates with some context ctx, attachments atch and headers headers, then we could do the following to use the template system.

from email_extras.utils import send_mail_template

send_mail_template("Subject", 'example_mail', from_address, to_address,
    fail_silently=False, attachments=atch, context=ctx, headers=headers)

We use django-email-extras to send template based mails. The email templates should be placed in festflow/templates/email-extras/. PGP encrypted mails could also be sent via the django-email-extras module. For more information on how to configure PGP encryption module, please refer here.

We use django-forms-builder for making custom forms available via admin section. A lot of stuff could be configured as mentioned here in settings.py.