Глас

This a minimalistic (essentially text-only) forum written in Python using Django web framework. It's possible to use it in production after some further refinement, but it's currently not the aim of this project.

Aim of the project is to practice Python/Django development. This does not mean, however, that this is a primitive toy project. This one was approached seriously and with certain enthusiasm, so I guess doesn't suck too badly in what it tries to achieve.

Quick start

To test the project, just install dependencies (you may want to do it inside of some kind of virtual environment, but I don't cover it here):

# pip install -r requirements.txt

Then create migrations and migrate (you need to be in project's directory):

$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate

Finally, it may be more interesting to test the site with some data, so run populate.py script to generate data:

$ python populate.py -u 20 -g 10 -t 30 -m 500

The script itself has various options, you can see them with help of --help option. Note that password of every generated user is user.

Once the data is generated start development server and go to 127.0.0.1:8000 in your browser:

$ python manage.py runserver

Features

Here is list of features that should help you understand what is this about.

Users can register on the site.
Once registered, user can create tagged topics.
Other users can filter all existing topics by tag and possibly by other criteria; this way they can find a topic of interest.
Every topic has introducing post. Just like any other post, it can be upvoted. Upvoting is reversible, but a post cannot be downvoted. Its rating can be used to order topics, etc.
Although every post can be “upvoted”, there is no such thing as karma (sum of all upvotes from all posts by particular user) that would grant additional privileges to users. This way we avoid inequality on the site, while users still can see what others deem important or otherwise noticeable.
Users can post in any topic of course. Standard markdown is used. User can only edit or delete his/her post when it's the latest post in thread.
There is notion of user profile, which is useful if you want to edit your own profile but is currently quite boring if you want to take a look at other people's profiles. Although you can see their recent postings.
Many other little goodish things like decent pagification, links per post, etc., start development server and see for yourself.

Dependencies

There should be requirements.txt for your convenience, by the way.

Python 3
Django 1.8
Django Registration Redux 1.2
Markdown 2.6.2
Bleach 1.4.2

TODO List

Allow selection of page size on main page.
Allow users edit already existing messages (staff can edit everything, but normally only last message in thread can be edited and only by its author).
Allow users create tags.

License

Distributed under GNU GPL, version 3.

mrkkrp / glass