Volunteer Planner is a platform to schedule shifts of volunteers. Volunteers register at the platform and choose shifts. The admin of the website can easily add new organizations, places and shifts. The software has a location based hierarchy (country / region / area / city) and has a hierarchy of organizations (organizations, facilities, tasks and workplaces) - it can be used for a variety of purposes.
The project is currently running at https://volunteer-planner.org/.
There are some feature requests to be implemented in the future. The software currently needs a centralized administration of the shifts, but it is one of the main goals of the current development to empower organizations to schedule shifts for their facilities on their own.
If you are interested to join the development team, just make pull requests or come to a meeting in Berlin/Germany: http://www.meetup.com/de/coders4help/
User: The volunteers and administrators just need a (modern) web browser to use the volunteer-planner application.
Developer: Developers need a python development environment (see project setup) and specific versions of external libraries (see /requirements directory, t). Development can be done with a sqlite databases, there is no need to run and configure postgres or mysql.
Server: For production use you need a Python ready web server, for example uWSGI as web server for the Python WSGI with nginx as proxy server visible to the end user (volunteers and administrators). You also need a MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
If your machine is setup to work on Django projects, you might skip this step.
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip git npm
This will install Python libraries and Git.
Using MySQL locally for development is optional.
If you are going to use a local MySQL server, additionally install
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev mysql-client mysql-server
This will install MySQL server, it will ask you to set a root password [ROOT_PASSWORD] for the MySQL server, if you haven't already set up MySQL in the past. Remember the password.
Open the MySQL shell
mysql -u root -p
and execute following queries to setup the DB
CREATE DATABASE volunteer_planner;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON volunteer_planner.* to vp identified by 'volunteer_planner';
Note: For the local environment, the DB username is assumed to be 'vp' and their password is assumed to be 'volunteer_planner'.
Please fork us on GitHub and clone your fork
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_ACCOUNT/volunteer_planner.git
Please do Pull Requests against the develop branch.
If you have questions concerning our workflow please read the Development Rules wiki page.
Create an virtualenv (follow the installation guide at virtualenvwrapper to install virtualenvwrapper):
$ mkvirtualenv vp
Note: using vp as your virtualenv's name is a recommendation, not a requirement.
The virtual environment should be enabled afterwards. For starting/continuing working on the project using the virtualenv, activate the virtual env using
$ workon vp
Update pip
pip install -U pip
For a local sqlite DB install
pip install -r /path/to/volunteer_planner.git/requirements/dev.txt
or, if you intend to use MySQL locally, install
pip install -r /path/to/volunteer_planner.git/requirements/dev_mysql.txt
Note: /path/to/volunteer_planner.git means the path of your local clone of the
GitHub project. Replace it accordingly with the actual path.
This step is optional but recommended.
Every time, a virtualenv is activated with virtualenvwrappers' workon command,
a postactivate script is executed. This comes in handy to autmatically setup
a projects' environment variables and automate some reoccuring tasks.
For more details on virtualenvwrapper hooks, see virtualenvwrapper: Per-User Customization.
You might consider to use this example postactivate script
(located at $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate)
#!/bin/bash
# This hook is run after this virtualenv is activated.
export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="volunteer_planner.settings.local"
cd /path/to/volunteer_planner.git/
git fetch --all
git status
Note: You'll need to re-active your virtual environment after each change to it's postactivate hook to take effect. Just run workon vp again, to make sure your current venv session has executed the postactivate hook.
When you prefer to use MySQL locally, you'll probably need to use the settings module volunteer_planner.settings.local_mysql instead of volunteer_planner.settings.local.
Also, if you need to use non-default settings values, setting (exporting) the
environment variables in your virtualenvs' postactivate hook is a good place
if you're not using an IDE to configure your environment variables.
Activate your env and change dir to your local forks' git repository (if not done yet).
workon vp
cd /path/to/volunteer_planner.git
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py createsuperuser
You will be asked for username, email and password (twice). Remember that username and password.
./manage.py runserver
Try opening http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.
To add new organizations and shifts, you have to access the backend at
http://localhost:8000/admin. If prompted, login with the username/password of
the superuser you created earlier (in case you don't see an error page here).
http://localhost:8000/admin
Run management command
./manage.py create_dummy_data 5 --flush True
with activated virtualenv to get 5 days of dummy data and delete tables in advance.
The number (5 in the above example) creates 5 days dummy data count from today.
If you just use ./manage.py create_dummy_data 5 without --flush it is NOT deleting data before putting new data in.
Feature pull requests should be accompanied by appropriate tests. We have unit and integration tests that
are run with py.test, and functional/behave tests that are run with selenium.
To run unit tests, run the following command (with your virtual env activated, see 3.)
$ py.test -v [/path/to/volunteer_planner.git/]
If you want to generate a coverage report as well, run
$ py.test --cov=. --cov-report html --cov-report term-missing --no-cov-on-fail -v
This generates a nice HTML coverage page, to poke around which can be found at /path/to/volunteer_planner.git/htmlcov/index.html.
Note: The directory htmlcov is git-ignored.
To run selenium tests, run
$ behave tests/_behave
We use Transifex (tx) for managing translations.
- Please read
- Please avoid internationalized strings / messages containing HTML markup. This makes the site layout depending on the translators and them getting the markup right; it's error prone and hardly maintainable when the page's layout changes.
- use
trimmedoption in blocktrans template tags, if indention is not intended. - Please provide contextual markers on strings to help translators understanding the usage of the strings better. The shorter an internationalized string is, the more abigious it will be and the more important an contextual hint will be.
- Code your stuff using the
ugettext_lazy as _etc. methods to mark internationalized strings - Update the po files
./manage.py makemessages --no-wrap --no-obsolete -l enThe options are intended to make the output more git-friendly. - Push the updated translations to git. Do not intend to translate in the local .po files, any changes here will be overwritten when translations are pulled from tx.
- Transifex will automatically update the source strings via github once a day and make them available for translation.
4.1. If necessary, translation managers (meaning VP's Transifex project admins) can update the source language manually using the tx client command
tx push -s django. - Translators will then translate on VP's Transifex project
- When new translations are available on Transifex
tx pullwill update the local .po files with translations from TX ./manage.py makemessages --no-wrap --no-obsoletewill reformat po files in a more readable single-line message string format./manage.py compilemessages- Test if it looks good and works as intended
- Commit and push the updated translations to git
Your local installation should be translated then. The .mo file created by compilemessages is gitignored, you'll need to (re-)generate it locally every time the .po file changes.
You first need to make sure that the transiflex client is installed (should be in the requirements/dev.txt file).
pip install transifex-client
- For further installation infos and setup read Transifex: Client setup
- Then, sign up at https://www.transifex.com, search for the project volunteer-planner.org, and join the respective team.
- If you used an Oauth-ish method (Google, Facebook, etc.) to sign up for Transifex, you might need to set a password in your Transifex profile before you can use the client.
- Edit your personal transifex configuration file that is stored in your home directory at ~/.transifexrc
[https://www.transifex.com]
username = YOUR_TRANSIFEX_USERNAME
token =
password = YOUR_TRANSIFEX_PASSWORD
hostname = https://www.transifex.com
Make sure not to share this file with anyone, as it contains your credentials! For more information on configuration, see http://docs.transifex.com/client/config/