Roots is a community-based site framework for seminar communities.

Example of live production site is available at: STROM website

Unfortunately, only public parts of the website are available.

Many educational seminar communities exist (see this list for only those in Czech and Slovak republic ), and often each of them provides their own web portal for managing all the work and information that needs to be stored with varying degree of success.

Users, problem statements, solutions, submissions, leaderboards, evaluation, keeping the competitors up to date - all of that requires non-trivial effort to implement in the web interface.

Roots is being built with the purpose of being an universal solution for correspondence seminars communities, while at the same time it keeps flexibility as one of the key requirements.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, build on Django.

Recommended approach for trying Roots out is to use virtualenv, since Roots has a lot of version-fixed dependencies:

$ virtualenv rootsenv
$ source rootsenv/bin/activate

After that, setup itself is just running few commands:

$ git clone git://git.github.com/tbabej/roots.git         # clone the repository
$ cd roots
$ pip install -r requirements.txt                         # install the dependencies
$ cp roots/local_settings.py.in roots/local_settings.py   # setup default local settings
$ cp -r templates_custom.in templates_custom              # setup default custom templates
$ python manage.py syncdb --noinput                       # setup the database
$ python manage.py migrate                                # apply the migrations

Now, the Roots should be ready to go. There are two more steps you'd probably want to do:

$ python manage.py createsuperuser                        # setup admin account
$ python manage.py runserver

After that, a empty Roots site should run just fine!

• Management of users
  • Both participants and organizers
  • Allows regular registrations and social logins
• Management of correspondence competition
  • Handling of seasons and series of problems
  • Electronic user problem submission
  • Dynamic leaderboards
• Posts and static pages
  • Organizers are allowed to post new information (in blog style), in WYSIWYG editors
  • Support for static pages available
• Sophisticated problem database for organizers
  • Problems sorted into problemset, with various categories, severities, rankings, as well as usage stats available
• Leaflet management
• Camp management (as a reward for best competitors)
• Other events registration management
• Full site LaTex support
• Built-in wiki for organizers

I'm happy to help any correspondence seminar which wants to try Roots as a basis for their new site. Any feedback is welcome. Please submit issues, or send me a email (address can be found in the commits).

I'm also looking for help coming from fellow developers, please reach out to me via pull requests for contributions or plain old email for any help you might need.

Roots project logo based on the green engineering icon by The Noun Project, which was relesed under public domain.