Featured Pages Open ONI Plugin

This plugin allows you to quickly display page images in a "featured content" section. You can display random pages from all of your titles, or you can configure the plugin to use specifically chosen pages.

Compatibility

The "main" branch should not be considered stable. Unlike the core Open ONI repository, plugins don't warrant the extra overhead of having separate development branches, release branches, etc. Instead, it is best to find a tag that works and stick with that tag.

• Featured Pages v0.4.0 and prior only work with Python 2 and Django 1.11 and prior
  • Therefore these versions of the Featured Pages plugin are only compatible up to (and including) ONI v0.11
• Featured Pages releases v0.5.0 and later require Python 3 and Django 2.2, and should be used with ONI v0.12 and later

Setup

The setup for this plugin is slightly involved, but bear with us!

git clone git@github.com:open-oni/plugin_featured_content.git onisite/plugins/featured_content

Add it to your INSTALLED_APPS in onisite/settings_local.py, above your theme (default or custom themes you've created):

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.humanize',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    'onisite.plugins.featured_content',
    'themes.nebraska',
    'core',
)

Put in a new URL path into onisite/urls.py above the core.urls line. You can put this plugin at whatever URL you prefer, but two examples are given below.

  # This path will overwrite / (the root URL of the site)
  # The view is imported because including a URLconf module at the root URL
  # generates a Django warning
  from onisite.plugins.featured_content import views as fc_views
  ...
  re_path(r'^$', fc_views.featured, name="featured_home"),

  # This path will put the plugin at /featured_content
  re_path(r'^featured_content/', include("onisite.plugins.featured_content.urls")),

  # make sure you include your featured_content link above the core urls
  path('', include("core.urls")),

Now copy a few configuration / template files

cd onisite/plugins/featured_content
cp config_example.py config.py
cp templates/featured_example.html templates/featured.html

Configuration

There are three possible options for the behavior of this plugin:

• random selection from all pages (changes each day)
• "on this day" selection, defaults to random if nothing occurred on that day
• user selected pages of interest

Please find below descriptions of how to configure the plugin for each of the above options.

Random Selection

config.py

RANDOM = True
NUMBER = 4      # number of results that will be returned

On This Day

You must first set RANDOM to False to use this feature

config.py

RANDOM = False
THISDAY = True
MINYEAR = 1750   # earliest year to search for "on this day"
MAXYEAR = 2000   # latest year to search for "on this day"
NUMBER = 4       # number of results that will be returned

User Selection

To get at the user selected featured pages, first set RANDOM and THISDAY to False, then add information for your specifically requested pages.

config.py

RANDOM = False
THISDAY = False
NUMBER = 4
PAGES = (
  {
      'lccn': 'sn83045350',
      'date': '1878-01-03',
      'edition': 1,
      'sequence': 1,
      'caption': 'Put a caption for your newspaper here'
  },
  {
      'lccn': 'sn83045350',
      'date': '1878-01-03',
      'edition': 1,
      'sequence': 2,
      'caption': 'This is the second page of an issue'
  },
)

If you enter more PAGES than your max NUMBER, a subset will be selected randomly (each day) from your featured set. You can get the information for lccn, date, edition, and sequence from the URL for an individual page.

http://newspapers.uni.edu/lccn/sn83045350/1878-01-03/ed-1/seq-1/

• edition will typically always be 1, unless if the paper has morning and evening runs, etc
• sequence refers to the page number, so 1 is also a good choice if you want the front page of a particular day

Customizing the Template

You may want to change the text on the featured content page. Open up templates/featured.html and add any HTML you need in {% block featured_description %}

API use

If you only want to get at the data without using the templates or routing provided, you can do something like this:

# In your theme's views.py:
from onisite.plugins.featured_content import helpers as featured_content_helpers

def home(request):
    """Grab featured content from the plugin, then set up some of the
    high-level data like approximate page count"""
    pages, this_day_title = featured_content_helpers.get_pages()
    approx_pages = "about 900,000 pages"
    earliest_year = 1900
    latest_year = 1900

    return render(request, 'home.html', locals())

This function lets you grab the pages and "this_day_title" variable, and then set up your own variables from other data sources, as well as render whatever template you want. The plugin must still be configured, and must still be in your app list, but you wouldn't add it to your urls.py, and you can create a template however it makes sense with your particular homepage.