django-reploc 0.1.1-pre1

A simple way for people to find representative locations on your Django-powered Web site.

django-reploc is a project that allows you to install a Google Map on your site to display and filter “representatives” for your site. These representatives may be dealers/vendors for your products, your friends or business associates, or just places you’ve been and want to advertise. I built the application to be a dealer locator, but I realize the value in an application like this and tried to make it as generic as possible.

Features

• Unlimited number of representatives.

• Unlimited number of locations _per_ representative.

• Automatic latitude/longitude determination for locations. If there’s a problem determining the coordinates to the address, you can enter them manually.

• Locations can have “attributes.” This is a way of specifying, for example, which locations carry which lines of your products.

• You can decide whether you want to use JavaScript or Python to do the heavy lifting.

• Users can search for locations within a radius of an address they specify.

• Offer your users driving directions to various representative locations.

Requirements

django-reploc requires at least Django 1.0. For automatic coordinate determination, django-reploc requires the geopy library. This can be installed using easy_install geopy. The application also requires that you have a Google Maps API key. To get one of those, simply go to the Google Maps API page and fill out the necessary information. Finally, django-reploc relies heavily upon jQuery in order to operate. I used the latest version of jQuery, which is currently 1.2.6.

Installation

Download django-reploc using one of the following methods:

easy_install

You can download the package from the CheeseShop or use:

easy_install django-reploc

to download and install django-reploc.

pip

Install django-reploc using:

pip install -U django-reploc

Package Download

Download the latest .tar.gz file from the downloads section and extract it somewhere you’ll remember. Use python setup.py install to install it.

Clone From Source Control

You can get the latest copy of the source code from any of the these official repositories:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-reploc
hg clone http://django-reploc.googlecode.com/hg django-reploc
git clone http://github.com/codekoala/django-reploc.git

Verifying Installation

The easiest way to ensure that you have successfully installed Pendulum is to execute a command such as:

python -c "import reploc; print reploc.get_version()"

If that displays the version of django-reploc that you tried to install, you’re good to roll. If you see something other than that, you probably need to check your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Configuration

First of all, you must add this project to your list of INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    ...
    'reploc',
    ...
)

Next you should add the context processor to your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS setting so the templates have access to the Google Maps API key. You don’t really need this step if you’re going to put the API key straight into your template.

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    'django.core.context_processors.auth',
    'django.core.context_processors.i18n',
    'django.core.context_processors.media',
    'reploc.context_processors.representatives',
)

Define your Google Maps API key in your settings.py file:

GOOGLE_MAPS_KEY = 'sdfsafasfdasfdasdf'

Additionally, you may specify whether you would like the grunt work (distance calculations and whatnot) handled by JavaScript or Python:

REPLOC_USE_JS = False

This will probably never be used much, but it’s there just in case. The application defaults to using JavaScript.

Run python manage.py syncdb. This creates a few tables in your database that are necessary for operation.

Next, you should add an entry to your main urls.py file. For example:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),
    (r'^locator/', include('reploc.urls')),
)

Finally, you’ll probably want to copy the media files that I use in django-reploc, unless you have some of your own. Those files can be found in the /media/ directory of the project. There are really only two files that you should need to copy to your media directory: reploc/media/js/jquery-1.3.1.min.js and reploc/media/img/ajax.gif (see http://code.google.com/p/django-reploc/source/browse/#hg%2Freploc%2Fmedia for the specific files). Alternatively, you may just override the templates to use whatever you want. I make no guarantees that the application will still work if you do that though ;)

Usage

As soon as you have all of the configuration taken care of, simply fire up your site (or restart it) and jump into the Django administration interface. You can add locations straight from the “Add Representative” page if you’d like. When you’re done, head on over to http://www.yourwebsite.com/locator/ (or whatever it happens to be in your case) to see the application in action.

Updating Location Coordinates

I’ve created a utility to help you update the location coordinates if you feel the need. They should be updated each time you save a location, but if you want to update all of the locations in one swing, you can use the command python manage.py reploc_update_coords.