Armstrong is an open-source publishing system designed for news organizations that gives your team the technology edge it needs to report in a media-rich environment.
This package is a meta package that loads all of the various components of Armstrong as independent packages. Installing this package is the easiest way to get the full distribution of Armstrong, but is not required to use the various components of Armstrong.
If you're installing Armstrong within a virtualenv (which you should be),
you'll have better luck if you create your virtualenv with the --distribute
flag.
For the latest released version of Armstrong, use pip to install it from PyPI like this:
$ pip install armstrong
You can track the latest development of Armstrong by installing the development version from Git. Obtain the latest version by visiting our GitHub page and either cloning or downloading a tarball.
Once obtained, switch into the directory of the repository (or snapshot if a tarball was downloaded) and tell pip to install it:
$ git clone git://github.com/armstrong/armstrong.git ... a few lines of output from Git ... $ pip install .
To help get started, the armstrong.cli component can create a basic project structure for you. Create a new project like this:
$ armstrong init mysite armstrong initialized!
The following files are created in the mysite
directory:
|~config/ | |-defaults.py | |-development.py | |-__init__.py | |-production.py | `-urls.py |~requirements/ | |-development.txt | `-project.txt |~templates/ | `-index.html |-wsgi.py
The config
directory contains your settings and root URLConf for Django.
The config.defaults
module contains all of the base settings that are
common to your environment. config.development
has settings specific to
your development environment, while config.production
contains all of your
production settings. config.urls
is configured as the root URL
configuration for your project.
You need to edit the config.development
and config.production
to
configure the database engine you want to use.
All of your requirements are specified inside the two text files in the
requirements
directory: development.txt
and project.txt
. You can
use pip to install the dependencies of your project by providing either file
as an argument to pip install -r
. development.txt
should contain all
of requirements for your development environment and include project.txt
.
The project.txt
file should contain all of requirements that you have
to have for your project.
The templates
directory is configured as the base for your project's
templates. It contains a simple index.html
that is loaded on a request to
/
so you can verify that everything is setup correctly.
The wsgi.py
provides a basic WSGI module for running your project. It is
configured to run using the config.development
settings, so you must adjust
it prior to running in production.
Note: You do not have to use the Armstrong project layout. You can utilize all of Armstrong's components inside an existing Django project. These are here simply to help get you started.
Once you have the project created and configured (remember, you need to setup your database just like any other Django project), you've got one final step. You need to install the requirements file as there are packages that Armstrong relies on that need to be installed from GitHub.
$ cd mysite $ pip install -r requirements/project.txt
Once pip has finished, you can test out everything by running armstrong
runserver
from inside your project. When you load the server, you should
see the welcome page.
Congrats, you're now setup and ready to start developing on Armstrong.
Armstrong uses date-based versions for this main armstrong
package. The
current release is 11.06.beta.1
. For more information about how versions
are handled in Armstrong, see the Versions page on the wiki.
Armstrong is broken down into multiple components. The main armstrong
package installs these individually with each being pinned to a specific
point release.
Included in the 11.06 release are the following components:
armstrong.cli
A command line tool for creating and working with an Armstrong environment. You can use this inside an Armstrong environment as a replacement for the traditional
manage.py
in Django.See the armstrong.cli repository for more information.
armstrong.core.arm_content
Contains the basic elements for Armstrong-style content. This does not provide any concrete implementations of models, instead it includes lower level functionality: fields, mixins, and a base
ContentBase
for creating a shared content model.See the armstrong.core.arm_content repository for more information.
armstrong.core.arm_sections
Provides a system for structuring models into "sections" to be used on the site for organizational purposes.
See the armstrong.core.arm_sections repository for more information.
armstrong.core.arm_wells
Functionality related to "pinning" content to a particular area. Wells give you the ability to specify any collection of models and their order to display in various places throughout the site.
See the armstrong.core.arm_wells repository for more information.
armstrong.apps.articles
Simple application for handling basic articles. This provides a thin layer on top of the article-specific features found in the
arm_content
component, but will meet the needs of many newsrooms with simple requirements.See the armstrong.apps.articles repository for more information.
armstrong.apps.content
Simple application for providing a concrete
Content
model that other Django apps can build off of.See the armstrong.apps.content repository for more information.
armstrong.apps.events
An application for creating events and handling RSVPs.
See the armstrong.apps.events repository for more information.
Start by finding the component of Armstrong that you would like to change. It is rare that you will need to start by modifying the main Armstrong repository to start.
- Create something awesome -- make the code better, add some functionality, whatever (this is the hardest part).
- Fork it
- Create a topic branch to house your changes
- Get all of your commits in the new topic branch
- Submit a pull request
Armstrong is an open-source news platform that is freely available to any organization. It is the result of a collaboration between the Texas Tribune and Bay Citizen, and a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The first release is scheduled for June, 2011.
To follow development, be sure to join the Google Group.