Idea-Box is a django app for collecting and surfacing ideas from users, in the vein of IdeaScale, IdeaX, and Django Voice. Idea-Box differs from these projects in its minimal, easily integrate-able interface. Idea-Box also takes a strong stance on transparency, such that ideas, votes, etc. are tied to specific users.

• Searching (via Solr's "more-like-this")
• Idea Submission
• Tagging (via taggit)
• Voting
• Comments
• Listing by recent, comment count, vote count
• Separate state for archived ideas
• Customizable banner for specific campaigns

• django (1.4.3) - This is a django app, so you need django.

• django-haystack (1.2.7) - A mapper between django models and search backends.

• pysolr (3.0.3) - Library for communicating with solr.

• django-taggit - A library for Tags within django

• mock - A library for creating mock objects for testing.

• south - A library for schema and data migrations.

• solr (and java) - A Search backend. Unfortunately, we currently require Solr (rather than another backend) because we need specific functionality that haystack doesn't give us direct access to. Eventually, we'll get a pull request to haystack which will reduce our solr requirement.

Modify your settings file to add the following apps:

• django.contrib.comments
• haystack
• idea

You will also need to configure haystack. See the haystack documentation

If you'd prefer to take the quick route, add the following to your settings.py:

HAYSTACK_SITECONF = 'search_sites'
HAYSTACK_SEARCH_ENGINE = 'solr'
HAYSTACK_SOLR_URL = 'http://localhost:8983/solr'

If you are going that route, make sure that you have a search_sites.py module in the root of your project with something like the following:

import haystack
haystack.autodiscover()

You will need to get the contents of the src/idea directory into your django project. The simplest way to do this might be a symbolic link.

mydjango_project/
  |- idea/      (includes models.py, views.py, etc.)
  |- mydjango_project/ (settings.py, url.py, etc.)
  |- manage.py
  |- etc etc etc

Add the idea.urls, haystack.urls, and comments.urls to you url.py. For example:

if 'idea' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS and \
        'django.contrib.comments' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS and\
        'haystack' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    urlpatterns.append(url(r'^haystack/', include('haystack.urls')))
    urlpatterns.append(url(r'^comments/',
        include('django.contrib.comments.urls')))
    urlpatterns.append(url(r'^idea/', include('idea.urls')))

You will also need to modify your solr configs. Take a look at the configuration files included in the root's solr directory. For a complete (but poor) implementation,

$ wget http://mirror.reverse.net/pub/apache/lucene/solr/4.1.0/solr-4.1.0.tgz
$ tar -xvzf solr-4.1.0.tgz
$ cd solr-4.1.0/example/solr/collection1/conf/
$ cp ~/idea/solr/* .
$ cd ../../../
$ java -jar start.jar &

From your project root, synchronize and migrate the new apps.

$ python ./manage.py syncdb --noinput --migrate

A basic set of templates has been provided. The 'base.html' template should probably be overwritten into something less basic for a better user experience.

If users in the system have a profile module specified our templates will use this to link users to a profile page. This is specified through the AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE setting. Your profile module will also have to specify a get_absolute_url() method.

To use buildout, run the following:

$ pip install zc.buildout distribute
$ buildout

Then, run the django binary in the bin directory.

To create a campaign banner, use django's administrative page to add a Banner model. The text field will be displayed at the top of the Idea-Box idea listing page. The banner will only be displayed between Start Date and End Date (or indefinitely after the Start Date if the End Date is empty.)