Create a News-Curator and News Subscription App using Django

I have recently released a django package named django-newsfeed.
This makes it really easy to build a news curator and newsletter subscription website.

Today I'm going to show you how to easily create a news curator website or
add a newsfeed subscription service to your existing website.

Requirements:

• Django >= 2.2
• django-newsfeed
• celery
• celery-beat
• redis

Setup Project:

Lets get started

1. Create Virtualenv and install requirements:

$ mkvirtualenv example-newsfeed     # you can use virtualenv instead of virtualenvwrapper
$ mkdir django-newsfeed
$ cd django-newsfeed/

$ pip install celery Django django-celery-beat django-newsfeed redis

** You need to have redis installed in your system. Here is a guide

1. Setup django:

$ django-admin.py startproject example_newsfeed .    # dot (.) is added to create project on current directory
$ python manage.py migrate

1. Now add newsfeed and celery-beat to installed apps.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'django_celery_beat',
    'newsfeed',
]

1. Add django-newsfeed urls to project urls.py.

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('newsfeed/', include('newsfeed.urls', namespace='newsfeed')),
    ...
]

1. Create superuser and Run Django Development Server

$ python manage.py createsuperuser
$ python manage.py runserver       # http://127.0.0.1:8000/

1. Go to Django Admin Page, login and create Posts, Issues and Newsletters.

Now You can navigate to:

• latest_issue: newsfeed/
• issue_list: newsfeed/issues/
• issue_detail: newsfeed/issues/<slug:issue_number>/
• newsletter_subscribe: newsfeed/subscribe/
• newsletter_subscription_confirm: newsfeed/subscribe/confirm/<uuid:token>/
• newsletter_unsubscribe: newsfeed/unsubscribe/

1. Override Templates to your liking. To learn more about it click here Here is the code for this tutorial. You can see the overridden templates here. It uses bootstrap to style the templates.

Setup Sending Newsletters:

Now that the project is set up we can create celery task to send newsletters.

Configure Celery

1. Setup celery from here.

2. Add celery settings for redis to settings.py
   

# Celery Settings
CELERY_BROKER_URL = 'redis://localhost:6379'
CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = 'redis://localhost:6379'
CELERY_ACCEPT_CONTENT = ['application/json']
CELERY_TASK_SERIALIZER = 'json'
CELERY_RESULT_SERIALIZER = 'json'
CELERY_TIMEZONE = TIME_ZONE

1. Add Email settings to settings.py

# Email Settings
EMAIL_HOST = 'test_host'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'test_user'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'test_password'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

** Change this for production server django reference

1. Create a django app named core

$ python manage.py startapp core

1. Now add core to installed apps.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'core',
]

1. Create tasks.py file in the core app directory. Paste this code in the file.

from celery.decorators import task

from newsfeed.models import Newsletter
from newsfeed.utils.send_newsletters import send_email_newsletter


@task(name="send_email_newsletter_task")
def send_email_newsletter_task(newsletters_ids=None, respect_schedule=True):
    newsletters = None

    if newsletters_ids:
        newsletters = Newsletter.objects.filter(
            id__in=newsletters_ids
        )
    send_email_newsletter(
        newsletters=newsletters,
        respect_schedule=respect_schedule
    )

** This will enable you to call the EmailNewsletterSender provided by django-newsletter
in a celery task.

Now you can send newsletters from the django admin page.

1. Add this code to the celery.py file on your project directory. (celery.py file should be created following the step 3)

app.conf.beat_schedule = {
    'send_email_newsletter': {
        'task': 'send_email_newsletter_task',
        # http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/periodic-tasks.html
        # run this task every hour
        'schedule': crontab(minute=0, hour='*'),
    }
}

** This will schedule sending newsletters every hour.
Now you can send scheduled newsletters to all the subscribers autometically using this scheduled task.

1. Add this code to the admin.py file on the core app directory.

from django.contrib import admin, messages

from newsfeed.admin import NewsletterAdmin
from newsfeed.models import Newsletter

from .tasks import send_email_newsletter_task

admin.site.unregister(Newsletter)


@admin.register(Newsletter)
class NewsletterAdmin(NewsletterAdmin):

    def send_newsletters(self, request, queryset):
        newsletter_ids = list(queryset.values_list('id', flat=True))

        send_email_newsletter_task.delay(
            newsletters_ids=newsletter_ids,
            respect_schedule=False
        )
        messages.add_message(
            request,
            messages.SUCCESS,
            'Sending selected newsletters(s) to the subscribers',
        )

** This will override the admin action for sending newsletters to use celery task.

Source Code for this tutorial here: https://github.com/saadmk11/test-django-newsfeed

Video Demo:

More:

You can learn more about all the configuration for django-newsfeed on github.

Checkout the package from here: django-newsfeed

Conclusion:

If you use this package please feel free to provide some feedback on twitter
or on the comment section.
If you have any suggestion or want to contribute to this package
please create an issue
and read the contribution guide.

Feedback and Contribution is always welcome.