How to build a system for an editorial team - django

I'm developing a web portal that mostly works like a newspaper site. In the focus, there are articles, containing text, videos and images. These articles have attachments which shall be presented in a sidebar. These attachments might be the same objects that will be displayed within the body text.
I have been thinking a lot about how to create the structure and - and this is a major point - how to enable the editor to edit all this stuff comfortably.
What I evaluated were Django-CMS and feincms as complete systems, and several third-party-modules that do snippets of the work.
Now, I a have solution for inline objects: I forked the inline-module of django-basic-apps which is now able to take additional parameters for the objects to embed. Their parameters are an important thing to e.g. embed "an image with object id x, but max x pixels in size".
What is not solved with my approach is, to generate a sidebar containing a bunch of inline tokens. I could create a custom widget for this, though. A better solution would surely be to add a functionaly like somehow attaching generic objects (videos, images...) to an article object.
While my solution is working so far, I'm not sure if there are other ways to solve these common scenario, and I would like to hear some other experiences about this topic, and if there are any other ways you deal with it.
For there does not seem to be a bigger need of a solution for this generic problem, I will use my solution and see whether it proves in practice.

Take a look at Armstrong CMS. It's specifically designed to meet the needs of news organizations. It was developed out of the code that powers The Texas Tribune, a very large Django news site that won the Edward R. Murrow Award for best local news website in 2010.
Armstrong scales very well, is fast and can handle just about any kind of content you want to throw at it.

Related

Master-Detail (parent-child) Input form with Admin-on-rest

I need help/recommendation for creating an order like input form with MASTER inputs like (order no, date, customer name, address) along with DETAIL info in multiple rows like (Item no, Description, Qty, Rate, Amount).
I am using Admin-on-rest as front-end interface and Loopback for my backend api.
Being new to react/redux and still learning core concepts, I am getting a hard time in finding a good example/starting point to build this functionality. So far, I think this example based on redux-form can help in creating a custom component, but I am yet not competent enough to build this myself.
Any reference to a similar example or some simple code to get me started will be very helpful.
Ref. Image
I think you need this.
How to richly style AOR Edit page
The last answer on the page is a somewhat detailed guide on creating a custom edit component in AOR. Feel free to ask more questions here about how this will be done.
Looking at your design you will need to also think how this data will be updated at the API level. AOR itself will make a single request when you hit save. So how will your API handle updates to multiple models etc.

Building dashboards in django

I have a django app and I would like to display some graphical data visualization to my users. I am looking for an easy-to-use package that would allow me to add graphs and widgets.
The kind of widget I want to build is a kind of speedometer dial that is red at one end and green at the other. As a user completes their job over the day, the graphic/widget adjusts itself. The dial moves from red to green.
I also want an S-curve graphic that shows the cumulative amount of work accomplished against planned. That is kind of an x/y line plot.
My question are: How easy is this to implement? Are there any add-ins libraries or packages that do this already? I am trying to keep my entire application open-source. I've seen a couple subscription services that do this type of thing, but I can't stomach the cost.
I don't mind using ajax or jquery to implement such a thing, but I would like the most elegant and maintainable solution.
Any advice or examples on how to tackle this project?
There are lots of good javascript libraries these days, but all require some effort to learn how to use. I have not found one that really is easy to use, I guess because everyone wants something different. My general experience has been the more effort you put into learning them, the more you get out.
Google has gauges: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/gauge.html
Also
http://www.flotcharts.org/
http://philogb.github.com/jit/
http://www.highcharts.com/
http://www.jqplot.com/
Or really take control:
http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/
As first, see the following grid (https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/dashboard-applications/) on djangopackages.
Not sure if that's exactly what's asked for, but you might take a look at django-dash (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-dash).
It allows each user to make his own dashboard (from plugins available). Those dashboards can be made public.
Some screenshots (http://pythonhosted.org/django-dash/#screenshots).
It's modular and plugin based, so you need to make a plugin and widgets for every specific feature (in this particular case - the speedometer plugin and widgets for it). Each plugin/widget can include own JS/CSS when being rendered.
See the following chart usage examples:
D3.js integration examples (https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-dash/tree/master/example/example/d3_samples).
Polychart2.js integration example (https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-dash/blob/master/example/example/bar/).
protovis is no longer under active development, but they started a new poject: http://d3js.org/
You may choose from these packages:
https://www.djangopackages.com/search/?q=dash

How can I build a django homepage with updatable content?

I an building a kind of social network (think of it as last.fm, but gaming related). I want to have a homepage which will feature:
site news, announcements etc. in the main part
featured items in the right sidebar
player of the week in the right sidebar
I am trying to think of a way not to be hand coding these every time they need to change, which I understand is terrible design. However, I can't think of much.
I realize I need some kind of simple blog engine for the site news and such, but what about the featured content in the sidebar? Should there be a table in the database containing the featured items of the week? I think that will pollute my models.py with unnecessary stuff.
Please share any ideas.
There are lots of ready-to-go solutions ie.
Pinax - great package of reusable apps,
Django CMS - not so great, but could be useful.
Django's static pages - for basic stuff :)
I'd try pinax first - it has all of what you need.
As for your featured stuff - it all depends on what exactly you need, on your content.
If you need something special you'd probably finish up writing this stuff by yourself,
or overriding parts of ready-to-go solutions.
Featured Items and Player of the Week will depend (usually) on your project specific Player / Item models. It shouldn't take long to program these small pieces.
As far as news, there are quite a few different solutions out there. Here's one that I've created (because I can't think of a better one off hand):
http://github.com/monokrome/django-news/
The best bet with django is to find the smaller apps you might be able to leverage, and then write your own project with your custom wants/needs in mind.

ColdFusion CRUD

For quite a long time now, I've been trying to write and have been in search of "a really good" CRUD application. Don't get me wrong - I didn't say "The ultimate" CRUD application. Just one that could be rated 1st class.
What I'm saying is: Please don't respond to this plea with an answer like "Well, every situation is different..."
Q: Is there a blog post or something in the Adobe documentation that shows CRUD on a one-to-many relationship (Header/Detail), that uses web standards css (instead of tables), that uses best practices (CF9 has changed so many things now: scripted components, ORM), that uses the latest UI techniques (jQuery or some of the built-in AJAX features of CF9), that has a nice front-end (a nice looking header and background along with some pretty buttons)?
I know that's a lot to ask, but such is my quest.
A good example of a one-to-many relationship is the city/state xml files built into the Spry examples. There are 23,000 cities in the sample xml files, so I think that's better than just using random data.
I'm not really sure what you're asking, but I just want to respond to a couple of points in your question (this is more a comment than an answer, but since SO is stupidly limited in this, I'll put it here instead.)
that uses web standards css (instead of tables),
There is no "css instead of tables" - they are two distinct and compatible things!
CSS describes visual aspects of a document, whilst tables markup tabular data.
If you're displaying tabular data, then tables is exactly what you should be using, and you can use CSS to make it look more exciting than the plain styles that tables come in.
Since you're asking for a CRUD app, odds are you are going to be wanting to display tabular data so should be using tables.
(The common mistake people make is not understanding the nature of the web, and using tables to apply grid layouts to documents, when they should be using strucuted semantic markup instead.)
that uses best practices (CF9 has changed so many things now:
scripted components, ORM)
Scripted components are not a best practise!
They are an alternative syntax (for people that prefer having non-descriptive braces everywhere) they do not offer anything you can't already do.
i would strongly suggest you check out cfwheels. read the documentation, it's built for doing such crud applications and has an amazing set of features and will save you a lot of time. as for the interface, there are many jquery plugins out there that can handle this. i suggest looking at ajaxrain and find a plugin you like

What Features Should Tomorrow's Wiki Include? [closed]

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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