Project Information

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Zamtools-news is a simple Django application for generating a single news feed. It has been kept intentionally spartan and is intended to be used for delivering site news or updates.

Benefits

Bare bones approach
RSS Support
Custom views that mimic generic view contexts, but return more consistently named variables
Ready-made templates
Markup support
Tests included

Installation

Add zamtools-news to your project directory or put it somewhere on the PYTHONPATH.

You can also use easy_install.

> easy_install zamtools-news

In your settings.py file, add zamtools-news to the INSTALLED_APPS.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
   'news',
)

Optionally define the following settings in your settings.py file.

NEWS_NUM_RECENT = 10
NEWS_PAGE_SIZE = 10

NEWS_FEED_TITLE = 'Recent Articles'
NEWS_FEED_DESCRIPTION = 'Recent Articles'
NEWS_FEED_LINK = '/news/'

Synchronize your database.

> python manage.py syncdb

Configure your urls.py to include the news urls.

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^news/', include('news.urls')),
)

Usage

The following urls are all accepted by zamtools-news.

/news/	Return the most recent articles
/news/2009/	Return all articles for the supplied year, page the results
/news/2009/5/	Return all the articles for the supplied year and month, page the results
/news/2009/5/10/	Return all the articles for the supplied year, month and day, page the results
/news/2009/5/10/some-article-slug/	Return the exact specified article by year, month, day and slug
/news/feeds/recent/	Returns recent articles as an RSS feed

Zamtools-news comes with a set of ready-made templates. The urls.py included in the application will use these templates by default.

These templates can be overridden by creating any of the following files in the /project/templates/news/ directory.

/project

/templates

/news

article.html (include file used for rendering the article across all templates)
paginator.html (include file used for rendering the pages portion of the paginator across all pages)
article_base.html
article_archive.html
article_archive_day.html
article_archive_month.html
article_archive_year.html
article_detail.html

Additionally, feed templates can be overriden by creating any of the following files in the /project/templates/feeds/ directory.

/project

/templates

/feeds

title.html
description.html

Advanced Usage

The model has several convenient managers on it.

The public manager retrieves only public articles that have their is_public field set to True.

Article.public.all()

The recent manager retrieves recent public articles. The number of recent articles that are retrieved depends on the NEWS_NUM_RECENT setting. If this variable isn't set, the default is 10.

Article.recent.all()

Testing

Tests can be performed using the standard Django test command.

> python manage.py test news