Idea-Box

Idea-Box is a django app for collecting and surfacing ideas from users, in the vein of IdeaScale, IdeaX, and Django Voice. Idea-Box differs from these projects in its minimal, easily integrate-able interface. Idea-Box also takes a strong stance on transparency, such that ideas, votes, etc. are tied to specific users.

Features

Searching
Idea Submission
Tagging (via taggit)
Voting
Comments
Listing by recent, comment count, vote count
Separate state for archived ideas
Customizable banner for specific campaigns

Screen shot

Requirements

django (1.5.4) - This is a django app, so you need django.
django-haystack (2.0.0) - A mapper between django models and search backends.
pyelasticsearch - Library for communicating with elasticsearch.
django-taggit - A library for Tags within django
mock - A library for creating mock objects for testing.
south - A library for schema and data migrations.
elasticsearch - A Search backend. Unfortunately, we currently require elasticsearch (rather than another backend) because we need specific functionality that haystack doesn't give us direct access to. Eventually, we'll get a pull request to haystack which will reduce our elasticsearch requirement.

Installation

Settings File

Modify your settings file to add the following apps:

django.contrib.comments
haystack
idea

You will also need to configure haystack. See the haystack documentation

If you'd prefer to take the quick route, add the following to your settings.py:

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.elasticsearch_backend.ElasticsearchSearchEngine',
        'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/',
        'INDEX_NAME': 'haystack',
    },
}

If you are going that route, make sure that you have a search_sites.py module in the root of your project with something like the following:

import haystack
haystack.autodiscover()

Folder Structure

You will need to get the contents of the src/idea directory into your django project. The simplest way to do this might be a symbolic link.

mydjango_project/
  |- idea/      (includes models.py, views.py, etc.)
  |- mydjango_project/ (settings.py, url.py, etc.)
  |- manage.py
  |- etc etc etc

URLs

Add the idea.urls, haystack.urls, and comments.urls to you url.py. For example:

if 'idea' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS and \
        'django.contrib.comments' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS and\
        'haystack' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    urlpatterns.append(url(r'^haystack/', include('haystack.urls')))
    urlpatterns.append(url(r'^comments/',
        include('django.contrib.comments.urls')))
    urlpatterns.append(url(r'^idea/', include('idea.urls')))

Elasticsearch

You will need to have elasticsearch installed and running. You can use this guide to install it.

Migrations

From your project root, synchronize and migrate the new apps.

$ python ./manage.py syncdb --noinput --migrate

Templates

A basic set of templates has been provided. The 'base.html' template should probably be overwritten into something less basic for a better user experience.

If users in the system have a profile module specified our templates will use this to link users to a profile page. This is specified through the AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE setting. Your profile module will also have to specify a get_absolute_url() method.

Buildout

To use buildout, run the following:

$ pip install zc.buildout distribute
$ buildout

Then, run the django binary in the bin directory.

Campaign Banner

To create a campaign banner, use django's administrative page to add a Banner model. The text field will be displayed at the top of the Idea-Box idea listing page. The banner will only be displayed between Start Date and End Date (or indefinitely after the Start Date if the End Date is empty.)

Zorig/idea-box