django-noticebox 0.1

Django-noticebox is a reusable Django application which provides functionality for sending notices to site users. The notices can be displayed when user signs in, sent by email or both.

Django-noticebox is a reusable Django application which provides functionality for sending notices to site users. The notices can be displayed when user signs in, sent by email or both.

This application is inspired by James Tauber’s django-notification but it is designed to be much more lightweight.

Installation

The django-noticebox application can be installed using standard setuptools setup.py script:

$ python setup.py install

Installation using easy_install or pip is also possible. Alternatively you can simply put the library anywhere to your PYTHONPATH.

Usage

Notice creation

In the noticebox.handlers module are defined following callables for a notice creation:

save_notice(users, preset=None, **kwargs)

Creates a notice model instance and saves it in the database.

mail_notice(users, preset=None, **kwargs)

Creates an email messages with the notice and sends it.

user_notice(users, preset=None, **kwargs)

Saves notice in the database and sends email. Effectively calls both save_notice and mail_notice.

All the handlers follow same signature. The first argument should be a user instance, a user list or a user queryset. The subject and body strings should be given as keyword arguments:

user_notice(user, subject="Hello!", body="Hello,\nhow are you?")

The save_notice and mail_notice handlers are actually class instances so they can be customized if necessary.

Notice templates

The actual subjects and bodies are rendered using Django template system:

notices/default/email_subject.txt

Renders an email subject. By default returns given subject unchanged. This template can be customized if (for example) a common prefix should be added.

notices/default/email_body.txt

Renders an email body. By default returns given body unchanged. This template can be customized if (for example) a common footer should be added.

notices/default/web_subject.html

Renders a notice subject to be displayed on the website. By default returns the given subject HTML escaped.

notices/default/web_body.html

Renders a notice body to be displayed on the website. By default returns the given subject HTML escaped and new lines replaced by HTML paragraphs (using linebreaks template filter).

Presets (alternative templates)

The handlers do not actually require any specific keyword arguments (neither subject nor body). The given keyword arguments are simply passed to the template in the context.

Non-default templates will be used if a preset argument is specified. For example following call will render tamplates in the notices/welcome/ directory with the username variable in the context:

user_notice(user, preset="welcome", username="alice")

Notice display (views)

Notices in a database can be displayed on the web site when user logs in. Two class based views are defined in the noticebox.views module:

NoticeListView

Displays paginated list of notices for the authenticated user.

NoticeDetailView

Display notice detail and marks it as read.

Both views are included in the noticebox.urls urlpatterns which means that if no customization is needed then they can be simply included in the url configuration:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # ...
    (r'^notices/', include('noticebox.urls')),
    # ...
)

Simple templates for the views are present but it may be better to override them for real projects.

Context processor

The application provides a context processor which makes count of unread messages available in the template:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    # ...
    'noticebox.context_processors.notices',
    # ...
)

The unread notice count is available in the notice_unread_count variable. No database queries are executed until it is necessary.

Testing

All tests can be discovered and run the Django test runner. For simplicity minimal Django settings are provided so all the tests can be run using Django admin utility like this:

django-admin.py test noticebox \
    --settings=noticebox.tests.settings --pythonpath=$PWD