django-danceschool 0.5.0

The Django Dance School project: a modular, reusable set of designed to integrate all of the regular functions of a social dance school with the Django CMS content management system

Who is this project for?

Partnered social dance schools are complicated. We run regular class series in all sorts of different configurations, which may require prerequisites, auditions, complex pricing, etc. We also often run public events, some of which require registration, and some of which do not. We often manage numerous instructors, teach in numerous locations, and have to manage schedules and finances for all of these things.

At the same time, partnered social dance schools are often run by amateurs, with limited time and resources. The founders of this project are all Lindy Hoppers, and in that community, even many of the most prominent and successful dance schools have zero full-time staff. We have seen many instances of schools that are simply unable to grow or expand their reach, because they lack the time and resources to manage all of the logistical details. Those constraints are a disservice to the dance.

Over a period of several years, in Boston, we have sought to address these issues by building our own custom registration system, complete with all of the features needed to run a sophisticated dance school. Surprisingly, the commercial options for dance schools are very limited, inflexible, and often expensive. We ended up with software that suits our needs well, but that is also adaptable enough to be suited to a wide range of dance schools, including partnered social dances of all types, but also to many other types of dance. This project is the result of those efforts.

The project is designed to be very modular and adaptable to the needs to individual dance schools. You can readily customize the behavior of your site to meet your needs, all while maintaining full integration between your registration system and the public facing portions of the site. Many features that are not needed can be turned off without affecting the rest of the site, and the entire system is built with an eye toward making it easy for individual schools to add custom functionality and behavior.

The whole thing is integrated with a popular content management system called Django CMS, that works similar to other CMS systems that you may be familiar with. That means that day-to-day tasks like editing website content are easy; once your site is up and running, it is in most respects as easy to edit and maintain content as a site built on any other content management software. Best of all, this software is free and open source, so you are not stuck paying hefty service fees to a third-party registration provider for as long as your studio is in operation.

The cost of this flexibility is that getting your site up and running will take a little bit more work than it would with a paid service. You will need to run your own copy of this software on a hosted webserver. You will also need to manually enter a few key site settings before your site is ready for use, such as email, database, and payment credentials. Finally, you will probably wish, at a minimum, to create or adopt a custom template for your site’s design, and to integrate those into this project’s content management system (see details below). If you are unfamiliar with web hosting using Python and Django, then it may be a good idea to consult a person with the relevant expertise to get your dance school’s website up and running. However, we think that once you have things running, you will find that the benefits of having your own system are considerable.

Overview of Features

The following are the main features of the project:

• Class registration (advance online registration and at-the-door registration with separate pricing for each)

• Emailing of registered students

• Paypal Express Checkout integration for registration and refunds

• Stripe Checkout integration for registration and refunds

• Instructor scheduling

• Internal scheduling (private internal calendars for all staff members)

• Substitute teaching

• Expense and revenue reporting

• Optional automatic generation of expense and revenue line items for instructors, substitute teachers, and venues

• Monthly, annual, and by-series financial summaries

• Instructor-level financial summaries (for tax purposes)

• Graphs showing school performance over time as well as breakdowns by location, type of class, etc.

• Discounts

• Vouchers and gift certificates

• Configurable customer prerequisites

• A simple news feed and FAQ system

The following features are in progress: - Private lesson scheduling - Internationalization (ability to translate all site functionality into other languages)

History

This project was originally created in Spring-Summer 2010 by Shawn Hershey, for New School Swing (the predecessor to Boston Lindy Hop). In March 2015, the project was taken over by Lee Tucker and Andrew Selzer. Significant contributions over the course of the project have also been made by Dan Rosenthal, Jason Swihart, and Kevin Sihlanick.

Basic installation

What you need:

• Python 3.4+

• The ability to create a virtual environment (on Linux, install the python-virtualenv package)

• pip - the Python package manager

• A suitable database. For development and testing, SQLite is used by default, so you do not need to do anything to get started. For production uss, it is strongly Recommended to use PostgreSQL server 9.4+

• External library dependencies for Pillow, used for basic image processing (see the Pillow Documentation).

• Recommended for production use: Redis server <https://redis.io/> for asynchronous handling of emails and other tasks

• For Paypal integration only: SSL and FFI libraries needed to use the Paypal REST SDK (see the Github repo <https://github.com/paypal/PayPal-Python-SDK> for details)

Linux

• If you are using a package manager (such as apt), you can usually directly install the needed dependencies for Pillow. For example, on Ubuntu:

  sudo apt-get install libjpeg zlib
  sudo apt-get install redis-server
  sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libffi-dev

Mac

• You’ll have to use homebrew to brew install dependencies above. Beware you may run into the zlib issue which can be answered here.

Basic Installation Process

1. Create a subfolder for your new Django project, and enter it:

   mkdir django
   cd django

2. Create a new virtual environment and enter it:

   python3 -m virtualenv .
   source bin/activate

   • Note: Depending on your system, you may need to follow slightly modified instructions in order to create a virtual environment. No matter which method you use, be sure that your environment is set to use Python 3 by default.

3. Install the django-danceschool from PyPi. This will also install all of the necessary dependencies (which may take awhile)

   pip install django-danceschool

   Note: Additionally, depending on your operating system, you may need to install certain program dependencies in order to install the Pillow package and the psycopg2 package (as listed in requirements.txt). If you run into issues at this step of the installation, look for these issues first.

4. Start your Django project, using the django-admin command. To avoid having to set a large number of settings manually, we strongly recommend that you use the preexisting installation template as follows. Make sure that you are in the folder where you would like your project to be located when you do this.

   django-admin startproject --template https://raw.githubusercontent.com/django-danceschool/django-danceschool/master/setup/default_setup.zip <your_project_name>

5. Perform initial database migrations

   cd <your_project_name>
   python manage.py migrate

6. Create a superuser so that you can log into the admin interface (you will be prompted for username and password)

   python manage.py createsuperuser

7. Optional, but strongly recommended: Run the easy-installer setup script, and follow all prompts. This script will guide you through the process of setting initial values for many things, creating a few initial pages that many school use, and setting up user groups and permissions that will make it easier for you to get started running your dance school right away.

   python manage.py setupschool

8. Run the server and try to log in!

   python manage.py runserver

Following steps 1-8 above will give you a working installation for testing purposes. However, additional steps are needed to setup emails, payment processor integration, and other automated processes. For details, see the Installation page of the documentation.

Contribution guidelines

The goal of this project is to make an extensible code base that can be used by other dance schools. We can especially use help with:

• Bug fixes

• Creation and improvement of unit tests

• Documentation improvements

• Planning and implementing any significant new functionality that may be valuable to your dance school and also to other schools,

Issues and bugs may be submitted directly to the issue tracker.

Bug fixes, or other contributions that serve the goals of the project may be submitted as pull requests directly to this repo.

If you wish to extend this project with considerable functionality or major modifications, please get in touch with Lee and Andrew.

Who do I talk to about additional questions?

• Lee Tucker: [e-mail]

• Andrew Selzer: [e-mail]