20 Nov 08 The Task At Hand
When you take a look at the functionality of the current site, it can be quite daunting. Let me run down the highlights:
- News system with comments, categories, ratings, send to friend feature.
- Surveys with comments.
- Site messages or bulletins that appear above news stories in home.
- Web links database with ratings, categories, hit counts, and report broken links.
- Downloads with categories, comments, ratings, and upload capability.
- Contact form.
- Store page.
- Photo of the Day with comments.
- IRC status.
- Paypal based donations.
- Event calendar with user submitted events.
- Member map (google maps mash-up).
- Forum via hacked in integration with phpBB 2.x.
- Private messages via phpBB.
- RSS feeds for news and forums.
- User profile via phpBB (mainly).
- FAQ.
- Shout box.
- A “block” system allowing content to appear on the left, right, or center of a page.
- Security module via Nuke Sentinel.
- Various static pages, photo galleries, etc.
Wow. That is a tall order. Some of the applications are trivial (contact form), and some are monumental (forums, calendar). At least on first glance.
So with this list in front of me, how can Django help? First of all, the admin feature is going to slay many dragons at once, allowing me to easily add content and approve user submissions with only minimal code for me to write. Django has support for RSS feeds and a comment system that I can start with. Blocks can be implemented with Django inclusion template tags. The django-tagging application is legendary, and I intend to use this in the news system. Other 3rd party Django applications exist for some of these, and I’ll look at them for ideas or outright incorporation.
The forums and event calendar still loom large, and I’ll be writing more about them in the future.
There is a lot of work to do, and I have already started a few months before creating this blog. The next few posts will outline what I have done and how I’ve been doing so far.
