Starry Dong Django

Hello! Welcome to Starry_Dong_Django, a Django site built by me, Maria Violante, using the Django web framework for Python. Although this is a personal project and somewhat on the simple side, with primarily function-based vs class-based views, it's my first Django project, and I'm quite proud of it!

This project is for an author / short fiction writer that also does developmental and line-editing, so all models and views have been tailored with that in mind.

Features

Starry_Dong_Django features:

Django Apps

This project has been subdivided into a number of functional apps, including:

• a simple blog app with list and detail views
• a contact app for contact forms, using django simple-recaptcha (this has been changed to a simple instructions-following puzzle due to accessibility concerns.)
• testimonials app for editorial testimonials, which generates an internally-linked testimonials page (pull quotes linked to full reviews by leveraging primary keys.)
• And a short fiction/writing app, which features a number of models, including: Piece, which allows for cover-image upload and utilizes a Many-to-Many relationship with Genre model, as well as a Review model for short fiction reviews and Publisher model for markets that utilize one-to-many Foreign-Key relationships.
• The short fiction app also includes custom views, including detailed views for all pieces, a condensed bibliographic view, and genre-sorted views for pieces only in specific fiction genres.

Additionally, secrets required by the project (keys, email passwords, etc, are stored in a secrets.json file, with a get_secret() function written into settings to make for easier and more secure deployment.)

CSS and Javascript

• A custom javascript + CSS theme, "Starry Dong", which features high- contrast text and larger than average fonts chosen for readability, in in an effort to increase accessibility for those with visual impairments.
• Beautiful, full-screen parallax scrolling display with animation.
• Fully responsive; mobile-breakpoints implemented through media queries, viewport and other relative units, and a frankly ridiculous amount of flexbox.
• Slideout menu with flexbox header for mobile devices.

Current Status:

• This project was recently deployed to mariadong.com - first via shared hosting, but then switched over to pythonanywhere due to some issues with updating through the admin panel and the limitations of shared hosting (django 2.1 only, etc.).

Current Plans:

There are some changes that are planned for when I get around to it:

• Add a browser query option to disable animations for improved accessibility.
• Figure out how to integrate espeak with django-simple-recatpcha for audio captcha option, as it appears python anywhere doesn't currently support flite.

Notes on Cloning:

If you'd like to run this project yourself, you can either set up a secrets.json file and put in key,value pairs for the options currently listed with a get_secrets() function in settings.py, or you can just change those options to your keys for testing.

Additionally, static files will not load in a local environment unless DEBUG is set to True--as DEBUG==False instead loads them from a local environment folder on my hosting server.

Note: Is this great security? Am I breaking the "static root and static files shouldn't be the same folder rule?" (Yep and yep! But I like the convenience of doing a git pull to update my page on PA, and nobody pushes into this repo but me!)