Django-FAQ

This is a simple faq application for your Django powered site. This app follows several "best practices" for reusable apps by allowing for template overrides and extra_context arguments and such.

Forked by Manfred Macx LLC

There were a few little nits in here that made it difficult to use in our app, so we forked.

Features

• Question Headers can be created that can be used to group related questions into sections ;
• Questions can be "protected" in which case they are only presented to authenticated users ;
• Questions are linked to the current locale of the user, so you can have multiple FAQs on your website ;
• For every question, five similar questions are calculated and cached (this feature still has to be reviewed) ;
• There is a SubmitFAQForm defined that you can use to allow site

visitors to submit new questions and/or answers to the site administrator for consideration. All submitted questions are added as "inactive" and so it is up to the administrator to edit, activate or discard the question as well as set its' sort_order field and slug to reasonable values.

Installation

1. add 'faq' directory to your Python path.

2. Make sure you have the Localization middleware in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES

   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (

   ... 'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware', ...

   )

2. add 'faq' to your INSTALLED_APPS tuple found in your settings file.

   INSTALLED_APPS = (

   ... 'faq', ...

   )

3. Run syncdb to create the tables

4. If you want to customize the templates then either create a 'faq' directory in your projects templates location, or you can also pass along custom 'template_name' arguments by creating your own view wrappers around the 'faq' app views. I show how to do the latter in the 'example' project included - look at the views.py file to see the details.

5. If you'd like to load some example data then execute ./manage.py loaddata example_data.json

Example Site

The example app now has a convenient home page that appears as the default page. It has links to the available views. The pinax_example app comes up in the manner of a normal Pinax site, but after you logon a working FAQ tab is available and sub-tabs also appear when you view the FAQ page.

There are some saved FAQs in a fixture named initial_data.json that provide the example apps with some questions to view when you bring them up for the first time. These FAQs provide additional notes about installing and using django-faq.

I included an example site in the /example directory. You should be able to simply execute './manage.py syncdb' and then './manage.py runserver' and have the example site up and running. I assume your system has sqlite3 available - it is set as the default database with the DATABASE_NAME = 'faq.db'

There is a stand-alone example site in the projects/example directory. to try it out:

1. Install django-faq as per the Installation section above.
2. Execute './manage.py syncdb' (This assumes that sqlite3 is available as it is set as the default database with the DATABASE_NAME = 'faq.db'.)
3. If you'd like to load some example data then execute ./manage.py loaddata example_data.json
4. Execute './manage.py runserver' and you will have the example site up and running. The home page will have links to get to the available views as well as to the admin (assuming that you have the admin installed and it uses the "/admin/" utl.)
5. After logging into the admin you will notice an additional question appears in the FAQ. That question is "protected" and therefore not presented to non-authenticated users.
6. The capability to submit an FAQ is available and works whether or not you are a logged in user. Note that a staff member will have to use the admin and review any submitted FAQs and clean them up and set them to active before they are viewable by the end user views.

Pinax Example Site

This area is a clone of a Pinax Basic Project with some small adjustments:

1. 'faq' has already been added as one of the INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py
2. An include for faq.urls has been added to urls.py
3. A tab named FAQ has been added in templates/site_base.html.
4. The templates directory includes a new directory named 'faq'. It includes a custom base.html file that adds the sub-tabs for the FAQ tab page into the Pinax tab system.

To try out the Pinax example:

1. Install the faq app from the django-faq distribution in the normal way.
2. Download and install Pinax somewhere in your filesystem.
3. Adjust PINAX_ROOT in the settings.py to point at your Pinax installation.
4. Execute ./manage.py syncdb and then ./manage.py runserver and the app should come up.
5. If you'd like to load some example data then execute ./manage.py loaddata example_data.json

The home page that appears is the nominal Pinax home page. To get to the FAQ you can either:

1. Edit your browser URL to point at localhost:8000/faq/
2. Login to Pinax. After you are logged in, the FAQ tab appears. Select it. Viola!