django-danceschool 0.5.5

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. They involve regular classes in multiple configurations which can have prerequisites, auditions, complex pricing, etc. There may also be public events which require registration, and often involve managing instructors, venues, scheduling and finances.

These dance schools are often run by people with limited time and resources. The founders of this project are all Lindy Hoppers, and in this community, even the most prominent and successful dance schools have zero full-time staff. Many schools are unable to grow because they lack the time and resources to manage all of the logistics, whose constraints are a disservice to the dance.

Over several years, Boston Lindy Hop has sought to address these issues by building a custom registration system with all of the features needed to run a dance school. The commercial options for dance schools are often limited, inflexible, and expensive. This sofware is adaptable enough to be suited to a wide range of dance schools, partnered or otherwise.

The project is designed to be modular and adaptable to the needs to individual dance schools, and can be readily customized while maintaining full integration between the registration system and the public facing parts of the website. Unnecessary features can be turned off, and the entire system is built with a focus on simple usage and customization.

Django Dance School is integrated with Django CMS, which works similarly to other content management systems, making tasks like editing website content easy. Once the website is up and running, it is as straightforward to edit and maintain content as any other CMS. 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.

Overview of Features

The following are the main features of the project:

• Class registration (Including conditional pricing)

• Emailmanagement

• Paypal and Stripe integration for registration and refunds

• Instructor scheduling (Including substitutions)

• Internal scheduling (Private calendars for staff members)

• 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]