ListeningPost
=============

This is an application that analysis community interactions in order to help 
understnad the social dynamics found within it.

Status
======

This is an early stage project, and is largely a weekend hack, although I do 
use it myself so hopefully I'll continue to find it useful and continue to 
enhance it. I encourage you to contribute your own ideas and code.

There are lots of things to do ranging from making the ugly interface better 
through to adding additional analysis.

Features
--------

 * Modularised application structure allowing reuse of applications 
 
 * Mail App
   * Retrieve emails from a POP3 account
   * Automatically create a ticket, upon email import, to ensure emails are 
     responded to in an appropriate time
   * Extend message processing with plugins, supplied plugins include:
     * Automatically assign tasks based on regular expression matches
     * Wrap body text
 
 * Mailbox Analysis App
 	* Import a mailbox archive
 	* Build a social graph from communication archives

 * Menu App
    * Database driven menu system
    * Template Tags for inclusion in any page
    
Installation
============

Jutda Helpdesk
--------------

This project depends on Jutda Helpdesk, which is used to manage tickets in the 
community. At present this needs to be installed independently, as described in
http://www.jutdahelpdesk.com/documentation/installation/

It is necessary to patch the helpdesk to allow resources to be recorded against
tickets. See http://code.google.com/p/jutda-helpdesk/issues/detail?id=155

django-tagging
--------------

OPTIONAL: install django-tagging to allow items to be tagged consistently.

'easy_install' django-tagging

Configuration
-------------

Copy the file 'local_settings_example.py' to 'local_settings.py' and
edit it as necessary. instructions are provided in the file. 

Plugins
=======

Plugins allow new features to be added to the system. At the time of writing there
is only one type of plugin avialable, but there may be more in the future.

messageProcessingPlugin
-----------------------

A messageProcessingPlugin is called when a new message is imported.

Enabling a Plugin
-----------------

To enable a plugin you need to complete two steps.

First add its name to the 'EXTRA_INSTALLED_APPS' property in
'local_settings.py'

Next you need to create a 'local_plugins.py' file by copying 'plugins.py' and
edit the 'processPlugins' function accordingly. Usually this will simply be to
add an import and a 'pluginName.process(mail)' call. 



Creating Plugins
----------------

To create a plugin simply create a standard Djang app 
(using 'python manage.py startapp PLUGINTYPE_PLUGINNAME') and provide a process.py
file that contains a process function which will be called when the plugin is
required to do its work.

See any of the messageProcessingPlugin_* apps for example plugins