This repo hosts the code that runs thepeoplespantryto.com
The People's Pantry is a grassroots volunteer initiative dedicated to safely providing and delivering cooked meals and grocery packages to folks who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This website is a small-ish Python/Django application that serves up a form for recipients to request groceries and home-cooked meals, for chefs and deliverers to signup for those requests, and we use the Django admin to allow volunteer organizers to manage it all.
Our driving technology principles are:
- Accessibility
- Simplicity
- Collaboration
This application is used by a wide variety of people and it must be designed to be accessible to their needs.
We strive to strike a balance between new features and code simplicity in order to make this application easy for new volunteers to onboard to.
We have deliberately chosen a "boring" tech stack that will be easy to debug, easy to deploy, and easy to learn. We use Python & Django to serve pages, Gunicorn as the web server, Heroku as our hosting provider, and Postgres as our backing relational database. We have avoided adding Javascript frameworks or client-side functionality to reduce the complexity of the application and keep accessibility levels high.
One area in which we have traded off some complexity for convenience is the use of a bootstrap theme called landkit. Those of us involved in the project don't have a deep background in design and wanted something that worked well and looked good without having to build our own design system.
We welcome contributions to this project! See our Contributing guide and our list of open issues