PANDA: A Newsroom Data Appliance 0.1.4

About

PANDA is your newsroom data appliance. It provides a place for you to store data, search it and share it with the rest of your newsroom.

The PANDA Project is 2011 Knight News Challenge winner. The team would like to thank the Knight Foundation for their generous support of free and open source software for newsrooms.

Logistical support and fiscal agency for PANDA have been provided by Investigative Reporters and Editors. Our sincere thanks to them helping make it a reality.

Documentation for reporters

• Welcome to PANDA!
• Uploading your datasets
• Finding data
• Finding datasets

Questions? Ask them on our User group!

Documentation for editors

What is PANDA?

PANDA is:

• A place for journalists to store data.
• A search engine for your news data.
• A private archive of your newsworthy datasets.
• Extensible.
• Self-hosted.

PANDA is not:

• A publishing system.
• A universal backend for your newsapps.
• A platform for data visualizations.
• A highly structured datastore.
• Software as a Service.

See our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for much more.

Documentation for adminstrators

Setup

• Local development & testing
• Production deployment

Configuration

• Domain name (DNS)
• Email (SMTP)
• Performance
• Secure connections (SSL)

Usage

• Users
• Categories
• API Keys

Server maintenance

• Connecting with SSH
• Systems Administration (Ops)
• Backups
• Storage
• Upgrades

Extending PANDA

• API Documentation

• Source code repository
• Issue tracker
• Project wiki

Authors

The PANDA Board:

• Brian Boyer
• Joe Germuska
• Ryan Pitts

Lead Developer:

• Christopher Groskopf

Contributors:

• Dane Springmeyer
• David Eads
• Niran Babalola
• Justin Edwards

License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2012 The PANDA Project and contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Changelog

0.1.4

• Added “Forgot Password?” link. (#536)
• Added setting to explicitly enable/disable email. (#680)
• Pushing enter in a modal form now submits it. (#577)
• Fix broken “expand search to all categories” link. (#673)
• Improved usability of notifications. (#666)
• Fix unescaped quotes in searches breaking pagination. (#665)
• Fix “Browse all datasets” link on homepage. (#662)
• Fix major bug with how search filters are applied. (#661)
• Export cross-dataset search results. (#657)
• Export single-dataset search results. (#641)
• Users can now change their password. (#299)
• Users can now update their email address. (#652)
• Users can now update their name. (#150)
• Per-user pages instead of email links. (#650)

0.1.3

• Add documentation links to the header of the app. (#623)
• Reorganize documentation so users come first. (#624)
• Add metrics dashboard.
• Fix long-standing bug where dataset metadata might not get created. (#618)
• Intelligently handle currency symbols in numeric columns. (#538)
• Ensure related files are deleted when datasets are. (#612)
• Implement dataset paging. (#609)
• Overhaul datasets search urls.
• Use human-readable data types. (#588)
• Fix bug preventing new users from activating. (#614)
• Fix bug preventing new users from being created. (#614)
• Write user documentation. (#601)
• Fix bug where an empty cell in a datetime column could break import. (#608)
• Escape dataset names in email. (#610)

0.1.2

• Revise release process to prevent docs from referencing the master branch.
• Fix bug where users could not login if their username was changed. (#511)
• Wrote documentation for connecting via SSH.
• Made max upload size configurable via admin settings. (#508)
• Upgraded to Django 1.4. (#561)
• Fixed escaping in dataset titles displayed in notifications (#598)
• Doubled the amount of memory allocated to Solr.
• Made Solr much less likely to run out of memory during queries.

0.1.1

• Fix bug where quotes in dataset titles could break the view page. (#570)
• Fig bug where a dataset search url with no query would result in a 404. (#569)
• Prevent datasets created via the API from having duplicate slugs. (#550)
• Fix an issue where empty columns in a CSV could crash dataset creation.
• Make it possible to specify column types via API at dataset creation time. (#518)
• Import and search specific data columns (search filters). (#494, #506, et al)
• Implement a configurable throttle for asynchronous tasks. (#502)
• Added Justin Edwards to AUTHORS.
• Added favicon.ico. (#512)
• Better handling of timeout errors during file uploads. (#529)
• Implement ability to import specific columns with type data, i.e. filters. (#496)
• Fix bug where blank headers in XLSX files would be labelled “None”.
• Fix “unpack requires string length of 14” error during xls upload. (#486)
• Implement locks so import/export processes can not occur simultaneously. (#353)
• Improve handling of queries with inline punctuation. (#461)
• Fix error when adding a category via Admin. (#470)
• Add Niran Babalola to AUTHORS. (#464)
• Suggest deactivating instead of deleting users. (#464)
• Add “view all rows” link to dataset page. (#455)
• Fix bug that caused changes to a dataset made during import to be lost. (#452)
• Add feedback link. (#451)

0.1.0

• Initial beta release.

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