Rua - the Simple Monograph Workflow

Rua is an Open Source application designed to assist with the Monograph publishing life cycle. Stages include:

• optional proposal
• submission
• internal review
• peer review
• copy editing
• production
• publication

Rua is completely free to use under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v2 (see LICENSE). Ubiquity Press also offers a paid for hosted service for Rua.

RUA is written in Python using the Django Web Application framework and follows a MTV (that is, “model”, “template”, and “view.”) style. The template system is simple, easy to modify and uses Twitter Bootstrap 3.

If you want to hack on Rua, getting it set up is easy. You'll need a unix machine (you can set it up on Windows if you're super hard core). We recommend you use VirtualEnvironment with VirtualEnvWrapper. Once these are installed, clone the repo with:

$ git clone https://github.com/ubiquitypress/rua.git

Ensure VirtualEnvWrapper is installed:

$ pip install virtualenvwrapper

Make a virtual environment:

$ mkvirtualenv rua

And install the requirements (requirements.txt is found in the root folder of the repo):

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

This will install a small number of requirements including Django.

Symlink the settings module you require. In development, this will be:

$ ln -s dev_settings.py src/core/settings.py

These settings assume a root user with the password root and a database called rua. To create this database:

$ mysql -u root -p -e "CREATE DATABASE rua;"

Sync and migrate the SQLite DB (from the src folder):

$ python src/manage.py syncdb
$ python src/manage.py migrate

We have a few required database settings so you need to import some data:

$ python manage.py loaddata core/fixtures/settinggroup.json
$ python manage.py loaddata core/fixtures/settings.json
$ python manage.py loaddata core/fixtures/cc-licenses.json
$ python manage.py loaddata core/fixtures/role.json

In the future this will all be hanlded by an install command.

To start hacking run (from the src folder):

$ python manage.py runserver

You'll now be able to access the server from http://localhost:8000

Originally started by a team of volunteer developers, this project is now supported by Ubiquity Press.

Core developers:

• Andy Byers
• Mauro Sanchez
• Ioannis Cleary
• Paige MacKay

We're currently working on the Alpha, which is the backend release, this will be followed by the initial front end release then others.