We operate a ColdFusion site with a custom CSS acting as a directory of various companies. Depending on the type of company, we have a set of subpages containing specific information pulled from the CMS about the company, such as "location/directions". We're looking to add functionality enabling users to add comments to the existing content. I'm looking for suggestions on open source or other available ColdFusion software out there that could work for this. While we could write something custom, commenting tools have been done a thousand times and probably better than we can do it.
While what we're looking for sounds like a blog or forum, its more of a hybrid. We'd like to be able to add functionality enabling commenting on the content we post in the context we post it in. Seems like there must be something out there that can be easily modified and integrated with our CMS.
Does anyone know of anything out there we should look into?
I'm going to vote to close this too, as per the others, but here's an answer anyway.
If you just want to add commenting to existing content, perhaps use Disqus. It's not locally installable (and is not CFML-based; it's all JS), but it does handle most things one would need if just wanting to add comments to a site.
If you want a native, self-managed solution, unfortunately StackOverflow have deemed that sort of question "unworthy", so you'll need to ask elsewhere. Despite being an entirely reasonable question, for which the answers would be helpful to other people later on (which is - in theory - the raison d'etre of Stack Overflow. Although that's hard to tell, sometimes).
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I'm currently working on a simple scroll website with nothing really difficult (I could almost use plain html/css/javascript but it's a bit of practicing and I will maybe add a blog). And as it is simple I was wondering how to do it properly with Django.
So here is my question, I have a homepage template that is actually the website and I don't really get how I split my different part in different apps.
For exemple I have a contact form, do I need to split it in another app and then include it in the basic template ? I want to add a galery with image in a database, do I create an app for that ?
And the other question that goes along is how do I code an app that is not returning httpresponse but just html to put it in another template and do I still need views ? I would like to do a bit like a standard form in django where you do :
form.as_p or form.as_table
so maybe:
galery.as_slideshow
So my questions are quite novice and open but someone could give me some reading to get going, I would be really happy !
This is a question a lot of people struggle with and it seems like there are a lot of varying opinions out there.
I've found that the best way to really determine the appropriate answer for each case is to really distill the feature into individual requirements and group them by feature sets while keeping an eye out for additional uses outside of the project actively being worked on.
There is nothing which says you can't build your project to include a single app containing all of the modules you would need. Doing so seems like it would make your development easier initially right? So, the question to ask then is "What if I want to reuse (insert feature set here) in another unrelated project a year from now after I've already forgotten about the weird stuff I did to make it work originally?". Asking yourself that question forces you to think about your features in a much broader context and I think 99% of the time you will realize that a "Contact Form" requirement can actually become quite complex and really should be split up into at least one separate app (i.e. User Creation, Profile Management, Email Subscription, etc...)
Here is a link to a video about this very topic which I found to be useful in figuring out my way through this question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-S0tqpPga4
I know this is not really a hard-line answer to your question but I hope it helps point you in the right direction.
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I'm pretty handy with django and python but I'm terrible at the "visual" aspect of the web-design. Even after quite a bit of google-ing I haven't been able to find any sort of resource that has download-able templates complete with css, images, etc. that could be used to set up a basic website easily.
I'm looking for examples beyond the 5-line examples that you find in most tutorials ... I'm looking for something with the general nav-bar across the top, various content-blocks to over-ride through subclassing, footers, etc.
I've worked with others on django projects but always on the "coding side". I want to do my own project. I've set up all of the views, models, "business logic", I just cant get off the ground with the design section.
Any help would be appreciated.
Edit: Just to be a little more clear. I'm looking for designs (open licensed) ... akin to Wordpress themes. If you have a resource of just themes I can probably mung them into a django template but if you know of something that already provides them as templates I'd prefer that.
I've had some luck in the past with sites like OpenDesigns and FreeCSSTemplates -- they offer (mostly) CC-licensed HTML templates; you'll have to add the Django template stuff yourself. As James pointed out though, most of them will get you up and running, but you almost always want to take things a step further.
My advice: build up a small library of re-usable templates (using stuff from the above sites), get real comfortable editing HTML and CSS (because you will edit HTML and CSS), then find some kickass designers (preferably local) and get real friendly with them. Perhaps you can trade favors; you do some coding work for them, for free, and in return they do some design work for you. I've found that even if you have to pay, a good designer is well worth the money (seriously, who wants to spend their time testing sites in IE6?).
Good luck with your search though -- I, for one, would love to see your findings.
It seems like this is an area that is completely lacking. I've been looking for a django project, perhaps a meta-django project is a good way to go ;).
Maybe if designers could upload a set of templates against a simple and well defined set of models. They could upload a "main.html", "object_list.html", "object_detail.html", a css file and a few images. This would be something akin to the CSS Zen Garden project.
I've setup a github repository here: http://github.com/JudoWill/DjangoTemplateRepository. Feel free to log into the project and modify the wiki with requests.
The idea being to give newbies a starting point and a few examples for making their django website.
I suspect this has got nothing to do with django templates, your question sounds more of a design and markup. There are couple of css framework like Blueprint, 960, YAML.
I don't think you're going to be able to find what you're looking for unfortunately - I have the same problem.
Wordpress templates can assume a fairly well-known data model - every Wordpress installation uses the same predictable table names, every (say) blog page has a well-defined set of data that will be passed to the template - and even the plugins have only a limited number of plugin points to add extra data.
By contrast, your Django app could contain anything. I could provide you a pretty template, but unless the data I use in the template exactly matches your data model, it's not going to be useful. I could make the template very very generic - eg, just have it display the variable called 'form' if it's present, iterate over 'messages' if any are present at the top of the page, display a 'footer' at the bottom etc - but it will take you about 20 seconds before you want to customise the display of that form, and then you're back editing your own templates.
I think that the closest thing you're going to find are UI libraries like jQuery or YUI which can handle a lot of the work of making your UI look snazzy.
I'd like to be proven wrong though, it would save me going through the same trial as you're going through now.
Update: On re-reading this, it occurred to me that you're looking for a CMS, which Django is not. Two seconds of work with Google revealed django CMS. I haven't tried it, but maybe that's closer to what you're looking for? The django wiki has a comparison table of various django-based CMS solutions
Currently I'm using DokuWiki to manage my apps/scripts documentation, some articles I write and stuff like that... I like DokuWiki very much, it's simple and powerful but it's still too much for the use I've given it in the last 1/2 years.
I need something else, something different...
I'm looking for a way to integrate the little things I like in DokuWiki into my own website without needing a script, like DokuWiki, with it's own admin page. The website itself, my homepage, I like to code myself most of the things so it becomes exactly what I want. However, somethings I don't have much time for, that is why I'm using DokuWiki.
I want to ditch DokuWiki and scripts like these because I don't even use half of their capabilities. A wiki is a platform where people join their efforts and collaborate together to write stuff, it also has a revision system. These are two very important aspects about wikis that I don't care about for my own. I'm the only one writing stuff there and I don't care about revisions, never needed them.
What I like about DokuWiki is that I can point my browser to any URL within the wiki domain and create a page from there if it doesn't exist. I also like DokuWiki's syntax very much but sometimes it's very limited and I can't do what I want. The way you link between namespaces and such is also very nice. Too finish, a media/file manager is also very handy. These are probably the most important aspects for me in DokuWiki.
Basically, I'm looking for something, maybe a script, that would allow me to do the stuff I described above in a way I could integrate into my own website without needing a special administration area.
Does anyone know about such thing or I'm better off coding my own since my requirements are not that tricky to begin with, I just didn't want to have the extra work...
Or maybe any other suggestions?
Maybe you'll want to have a look at something like TiddlyWiki, which is a single-file wiki, that you can even put on a USB stick.
I chose xwiki over dokuwiki.
Another simple wiki is the one included with fogbugz. It is hosted for free for up to 2 users and might suit your project.
I may be off but very simple wiki with no administration and no users is LionWiki. I don't know how easy it's gonna be to integrate it into your website.
It's just one file and does not use database (like DokuWiki).
It does not have a lot of features though. It also uses a different syntax from that of DokuWiki.
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What features should "Tomorrow's" wikis include? How might they incorporate Web 2.0 features like AJAX? What other features are they currently missing? What do you want to see from the next release of your favorite Wiki?
Edit: How might a Wiki be integrated into other products? What "neat uses" could wikis have?
Preview-as-you-type works very nicely indeed here on Stack Overflow. Many wikis don't do that.
Make it really easy to link between pages, eg. that, as you type, the wiki finds likely pages you may be referring to. That way you can make links without having to know the exact title of a target page, and bouncing on the shift key to WriteInCamelCase, or throwing in square brackets. Make it very easy to link to other websites outside the wiki, too (and by "easy" I do not mean like wikisisters, which, if I remember correctly, is like foowiki:ALinkLikeThis).
Similarly, if you can generate links within text automatically, you could, for example, have a mail system that wikifies your email. You create a wiki page, say, for Joel Spolsky, and references to Joel emails in your inbox become links to that page, which you can find by clicking "what links here". (This probably needs something along the lines of Bayesian filtering to prune the stray references to other Joels... your Bayesian Classifier learns that if the context is smart and getting things done, it's Spolsky. If it's flying Viking kittens, it's morely likely Joel Veich).
A variety of RSS feeds for tracking changes would nice, too. (Diffs, full text, changes on pages I've edited, ...)
Wikipedia has grown a fairly colossal categorisation system ("Fictional Cats", anyone?); laying a taxonomy over a wiki's flat namespace could provide another way for users to find their way around. Wikipedia's doing this a little, but in fairly limited ways so far: there are links to the relevant category lists, but you can't, for example, look for a composer called "Smith".
Similarly, wikis give you this big graph of interconnected nodes, of how closely your community sees the relevant concepts as being. Is that interesting? Is that useful? Does anyone who isn't google want to think about this stuff?
PS. If you believe Paul Graham's definition of Web 2.0 as "Democracy, Don't Maltreat Users, and Javascript works now", wikis are two thirds Web 2.0 already.
I am personally already tired of wikis. Wiki as a software is outdated, now it is about wiki as a feature (like my favorite new website, stack overflow).
The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — came into existence when we introduced "Suggested Edits".
With "Suggested Edits", anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.
I'm in the process of choosing a wiki tool, and have looked at numerous packages over the past week. I'm sure there are dozens I haven't even heard of yet, probably good ones. But in general, here's my "beginner's mind" take on the problem.
Wiki markup should be abandoned. A wiki that is limited to wiki markup will only be useful to 'nix hacks and others who get excited about doing things the hard way and insisting that everybody else is stupid. I mean, Morse code is fine with me personally; I don't get what was wrong with a nice, clean dash-dot-dash. Or smoke signals, they were nice, except for the carbon footprint. But times change, and we have to change with them.
Real users (business users, customers, clients) want rich text editing. Period. And when a wiki tries to support both rich text and wiki markup, the results are not pretty. The model is confusing and (apparently) difficult to implement. The fckeditor extension at wikiwiki is a nightmare, for example. It's just not worth it.
Wikis need better access control. The idea that all content should be open to everyone is fine for an open, public, non-profit wiki like this one. But in the business world, that's not how it works. Restricting access is not evil, it's reality. Wiki tools need to do a much better job of providing access control: access to pages and groups of pages based on role or group membership, where groups can be formed by anyone on an ad hoc basis and users can belong to multiple groups and pages can be accessible to multiple groups, at the whim of the page's creator.
Those are the two things that I want, above all else, and I haven't found it in open source, at least not out of the box. Which, of course, is why open source is open source.
There's been some interesting work using wikis for testing and software development. EG, movement towards literate programming -- allowing pages to exist as both code and documentation that is compiled down into one or the other (or, I suppose, both simultaneously).
They have a regular session about this at the annual WikiSym conference.
I think one direction of Wikis is going from open ended collections of documents to an "everyone can edit but with more structure" applications like SO.
Another direction that I've seen is more direct integration with other project support tools, so project planning, issue management, and all that stuff.
Personally, I think the next big direction is going to be some sort of multimedia based Wiki, not just a Wiki where multimedia can be embedded in the text.
I really like MediaWiki. It's widely used and free/Free. The markup syntax is straightforward and allows you to do enough basic styling that you don't need to use custom HTML or to use a WYSIWYG. I assume by "sexy web 2.0" you mean Flash/AJAX, but I like MediaWiki because it works cleanly with basic HTML/Javascript (you don't have to wait for custom widgets to load, etc...).
What makes wikis reach their potential of usefulness is the community that develops around them more than the software itself. You need to find a niche where people are both passionate about (but not criminally insane about) the central topic and have enough technical prowess to log on to a website and edit some text.
"Wiki" is ultimately just a pattern:
Open editing by all/most visitors
Integrated revision tracking and rollback to reduce the cost of mistakes
Simple syntax for cross-linking between articles, and auto-creation of stub articles when referenced
That's not a perfect description, but it's a combination that isn't particularly magic. Successful wikis combine those things with a critical mass of people creating and maintaining content.
The next step, IMO, is less about web 2.0 shininess and more about the integration of better structural information. Adding any metadata beyond "this points to that" is an exercise in brute force hand-markup. Maybe microformats? Maybe the development of more structured knowledgebase software that uses wiki-ish editing UI but a smarter backend? I'm not sure, but I think better handling of the structured data is really the next wave.
Extensibility.
Check out DekiWiki, they are doing an excellent job with this.
DekiWiki extensions
The wiki-of-the-future will be completely editable online, concurrently by everyone. Check out EtherPad for a demo of the techonology.
For me, in terms of Enterprise style uses for a wiki, I have a couple of thoughts;
An effective way to keep and synchronise a central, web based wiki with multiple, offline, desktop style wiki's for people on the go
To move towards wiki as a function as opposed to wiki as a system, so we can integrate the wiki collaborative system into other things
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When designing a wiki application, what things should I take into consideration?
So far I have:
revisions
parsing some sort of markup text
keeping track of links in wikis, and pages that link to other pages.
related wikis i.e. wikis are related to others.
What else goes into building a Wiki?
If it's helpful, here is the database schema for Wikipedia (actually MediaWiki, the engine behind Wikipedia):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Mediawiki-database-schema.png?
I have done a lot of research and work with wikis over the last several years, for my own use and to support technical teams for my various clients/employers.
I have concluded that the most important criteria for a wiki is to make it transparent, like the original wiki at http://c2.com/. It should be so easy to contribute that the user never questions whether they should bother to do so. The editor must be easily accessible, it should use a conventional text-only (NO WYSIWYG!!!) wiki format, it should be easy to add new pages, it should be easy to link to external pages (other wiki or regular web), and it should have backlinks. Imitate the original wiki, and you will be fine.
If a user ever questions whether they should bother to contribute because it is too painful, in one way or another, then the wiki will stall and fail. I have seen it happen over and over again. WYSIWYG is one common failure mode, mixing in "rich" content like lots of files, multimedia, etc., is another, not being able to backup/restore is a big one. If you want "fancy" content, use a standard web server hosted "nearby", to which wiki users can link. Remember, wiki is about communication, it is NOT about pretty.
Have a look at TiddlyWiki. I think it has the best combination of features I've seen in any wiki. (For "pages" below, read "items" since TiddlyWiki is a single-page wiki. But I think these features should apply to wikis with pages too):
List of all "missing" pages (WikiWords with no page)
List of orphaned pages (pages with no links to them)
Most formatting is done by editing wiki pages
You can't screw up formatting, because there's a default if you delete your custom formatting
You can tag pages
You can include a page in another page
And plenty more that I haven't mentioned. I think the formatting is possibly the best of many good features, because it's so easy to edit and so hard to screw up.
Often overlooked:
Good search
Hierarchies. One of the things I miss most in Redmine's wiki.
If you find a good way to implement a wiki that is easy to reorganize, that would also be great (i.e. rename a page, or join two pages into one and don't break a zillion wiki links).
User interface -- one of the most frustrating things for users is that they have to learn one user interface for MediaWiki, one for TikiWiki, and one for any of the other myriad of wiki's out there.
The most important part of wikis is not the technical feasibility -- it's getting users to contribute and edit in a convenient and effective way. You can have the most technically robust wiki in the world, but if it's not easy to use, it will be useless as the community tool that a wiki is supposed to be.
Either copy an existing and familiar wiki syntax (such as MediaWiki), or be prepared to invest heavily in creating a WYSIWYG editor.
I wouldn't start a new wiki engine with the same features that everybody has, there are so many of them out there.
I would only work on one that offers something different/unique, much more than a standard wiki.
Some ideas include (maybe some wikis already have this):
The ability to have the wiki merged with a VCS, to discuss revisions/changes and be able to do code reviews (anything that gets committed automatically creates a page for the revision), having it linked to the committer and anybody in the discussion and sending them email alerts would be nice.
An API for the wiki that allows 3rd party application to do mashup-style integration.
wiki-style multimedia (Text, Images, Audio, and Video) that contains links to other media.
multilingual side-by side editing and translation.
a client-side editor/viewer (not web based) for faster response and real WYSIWYG editing.
...
Make sure you nail Ward Cunningham's original Wiki Design Principles.
Make sure you perform input validation on all the edits people make to prevent XSS. Nothing would ruin a good wiki like people getting hacked.
Every time I've tried to get non-developers to use a wiki, the difficulty of writing text has been the biggest barrier. A WYSIWYG editor along the lines of what StackOverflow has seems like a great idea to me. It still shows the markup in the box, so motivated users will eventually learn to use it (thus becoming more efficient), but it also shows a live preview, so that users get instant feedback as to whether their text looks correct.
Along these same lines, another annoyance is that every wiki seems to use slightly different markup. I guess each designer thinks they can do it better than the ones before. I would suggest using either MediaWiki's syntax, or something like MarkDown that's sort of standard, so that power users will have an easier time of things.
Finally, consider what about your wiki will set it apart from the many many many many other wikis already out there, and how your design will impact this.