emptyhammock-article

Overview

This package implements an idea for how some classes of users can effectively create content for their web site and use a combination of Django CMS plugins and other site features to make that content accessible to users of their site. It is not intended to be the only way content would be created for a site, and it should not be construed as an appropriate solution for everyone.

At its core, the package provides a multi-purpose Article class, a view for articles, and Django CMS plugins which allow the content editor to place particular articles or article teasers on a CMS page. Additional CMS plugins are provided to create article feeds. For example, you could place an article feed on a CMS page that displays links to sets of articles like the following:

• recently updated articles
• upcoming (future) events

The article feeds can optionally be limited by particular article tags and they are always limited by maximum number of items and maximum event start time.

Articles can be marked invisible either manually or automatically by a scheduled task. Support is provided for marking past events as invisible.

Planned development in the near term

Currently articles are editable only in the Django admin. Most content editors need a wizard-like approach to adding articles, along with autocomplete and other UI aids to prevent frustration.

Integrating this in your Django/Django CMS project

• Install the latest version from Github by adding something like git+git://github.com/trawick/emptyhammock-article.git@0.0.1 to your pip requirements file. Please check the current release.
• Install dependencies, not currently called out in setup.py:
  • tablib==0.12.1, django-taggit==0.22.1, django-cms==3.4.5, djangocms-text-ckeditor==3.5.1, django-filer==1.3.0 (and their dependencies)
• Add 'articles' to INSTALLED_APPS.
• Add url(r'^articles/', include('articles.urls', namespace='articles')), to your base urls.py's urlpatterns.
• Copy the sample_templates tree to your project (presumably to a different directory name) and update your settings so that they are found. You'll need to customize the templates for your application, but you may want to experiment with them as is until you actively use features that require a particular template.
• Optional: Call articles.utils.expire_articles() from a scheduled task in order to mark expired articles as invisible.

Specifying an Article search configuration

Full-text search can be enabled for the Article model, as described in this section.

Example Postgres setup

A Postgres search configuration will be useful in some circumstances, such as when searching should ignore accents. The following commands create a full text search configuration that ignores accents:

$ sudo -u postgres psql my_project_db
psql (9.5.10, server 9.4.8)
Type "help" for help.

my_project_db=# create extension if not exists unaccent;
CREATE EXTENSION
my_project_db=# create text search configuration english_unaccent(copy=english);
CREATE TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION
my_project_db=# alter text search configuration english_unaccent alter mapping for hword, hword_part, word with unaccent, english_stem;
ALTER TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION
my_project_db=#

Django settings

This configures Article search to use the search configuration created in the example above:

ARTICLE_SEARCH_SETTINGS = {
    'config': 'english_unaccent',
}

Importing event articles from a spreadsheet

Events can be imported from a CSV file or an Excel workbook. Here are the names of the required columns:

• Location
• Title
• Start Date (e.g., "1/31/2018")
• Start Time (e.g., "9:30 PM")
• Tags (comma-separated, like "Durham" or "Durham,Raleigh,Chapel Hill")
• URL
• URL Description

Rows must have a value for each column. Event articles can only be added; attributes cannot be updated by re-importing an updated spreadsheet. If an event article in the spreadsheet already exists with the same title text, location text, and start time, it will be ignored.

Support

Please open Github issues for suggestions or suspected problems. Even if I am unable to respond in a timely basis, the information may quickly become valuable to others, and I will eventually find time to respond to the issue.