django-faq

This is a simple FAQ [1] application for your Django powered site which follows several "best practices" for reusable apps and thus is very easy and flexible in its integration.

[1]	Frequently Asked Questions

Features

• Questions can be grouped into topics

• Questions can be hidden from non-authenticated users

• Question Headers can be created that can be used to group related questions into sections

• You can define a sort order for questions and topics

• Questions are (optionally) linked to the current locale of the user, so you can have multiple FAQ on your website, depending on the language.

  This feature uses Django's LocaleMiddleware

• For every question, five similar questions are calculated and cached (this feature still has to be reviewed) ;

• There is a form defined that you can use to allow site visitors to submit new questions and/or answers to the site administrator for consideration.

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 ./manage syncdb to create the tables

4. If you want to customize the templates then either create an '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.

There are some saved FAQs in a fixture named example_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_project 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 in settings.py

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 = 'django-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.
5. 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 FAQ and clean them up and set them to active before they are viewable by the end user views.

Requirements

As this application makes use of class based generic views, it is dependent on Django 1.3 or on django-cbv when using Django 1.2.