You write it, and we deliver it.

Write-it is an application that aims to deliver messages to people whose contacts are to be private or the messages should be public, for example: members of congress.

Write-it is a layer on top of popit from where it takes the people and adds contacts. The way it delivers messages is using plugins for example: mailit. And this approach allows for future ways of delivering for example: twitter, whatsapp, fax or pager.

Future uses are in votainteligente to replace the old "preguntales" (You can check here, to see how it used to work) feature, could be in the way for the site writetothem and any parliamentary monitoring site.

Installation

System Requirements

Elasticsearch

It's required if you want to play around seaching messages and answers, this part is optional.

In ubuntu you can do sudo apt-get install libffi-dev

Libssl

In ubuntu you can do sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Write-it is built using Django. You should install Django and its dependencies inside a virtualenv. We suggest you use virtualenvwrapper to create and manage virtualenvs, so if you don’t already have it, go install it, remembering in particular to add the required lines to your shell startup file.

With virtualenvwrapper installed, clone this repo, cd into it, and create a virtualenv:

git clone git@github.com:ciudadanointeligente/write-it.git
cd write-it
mkvirtualenv writeit

Install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set up the database, creating an admin user when prompted:

./manage.py syncdb && ./manage.py migrate

Troubleshooting database migration

There's a problem migrating and the problem looks like

django.db.utils.OperationalError: no such table: tastypie_apikey

It can be fixed by running it twice.

Then run the server:

./manage.py runserver

Testing and Development

If you want to test without PopitAPI or Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch and a popit api both are optional and can be turned off by creating a new local_settings.py file vi writeit/local_settings.py with the following content

LOCAL_POPIT = False
LOCAL_ELASTICSEARCH = False

Testing with Popit and Elasticsearch

If you want to test the pulling from popit parts, we're using a separate popit-api from which to pull people. For that you need to have MongoDB running, here is the download page and installation instructions.

After you have mongodb running you can do in a separate terminal:

./start_local_popit_api.bash

Running tests

For testing you need to run ./test.py

Coverage Analysis

For coverage analysis run ./coverage.sh

API clients

Write-it has been used mostly through its REST API for which there are a number of API clients. The github repos and the status of the development are listed below:

writeit-rails ALPHA
writeit-django ALPHA

There are instructions to install write-it in heroku

The instructions are in the following link.

duncanparkes/write-it