Playing with django-invitation module

Invitation to the Dance (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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In this post, I will explain you how to use the great Playing  django-invitation module, which as its name indicates permits to invite people to the beta of a web app, for example.

The documentation of the django-invitation module is accessible on https://bitbucket.org/david/django-invitation/wiki/Home

To install the module, I have used:

easy_install -Z django-invitation

I have followed the documentation. It indicates to:

1. Add invitation to the INSTALLED_APPS setting of your Django project.
2. Add the setting ACCOUNT_INVITATION_DAYS to your settings file; this should be the number of days invitation keys will remain valid after an invitation is sent. Add also the INVITATIONS_PER_USER setting.

At this step, I have the following lines in my settings.py:

ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS = 7
ACCOUNT_INVITATION_DAYS = 7
INVITATIONS_PER_USER = 3

INVITE_MODE = True

NB: they forget to talk about the INVITE_MODE setting in django-invitation's documentation. It took me half a day to figure out why invalid invitation key still led to the registration form !

Then the tutorial says to add this line to your site's root URLConf before registration urls:

1. (r'^accounts/', include('invitation.urls')),

Afterwards, modify templates to link people to /accounts/invite/ so they can start inviting. I prefer to refer to this url by its name in my template : invitation_invite (according to the source code on bit bucket)

Now create all the required templates:

• invitation/invitation_form.html displays the invitation form for users to invite contacts.
• invitation/invitation_complete.html is displayed after the invitation email has been sent, to tell the user his contact has been emailed.
• invitation/invitation_email_subject.txt is used for the subject of the invitation email.
• invitation/invitation_email.txt is used for the body of the invitation email.
• invitation/invited.html is displayed when a user attempts to register his/her account.
• invitation/wrong_invitation_key.html is displayed when a user attempts to register his/her account with a wrong/expired key.

You can find some examples for these templates on: https://bitbucket.org/epicserve/django-invitation/src/062213aa6ad2/invitation/templates/invitation?at=default

I used a direct link to the registration page in the invitation email, as the invited page is pretty useless in my opinion. Here is my invitation_email.txt:

{% load i18n %}{% load url from future %}

{% trans "Hello," %}
{% blocktrans with site.name as sitename and invitation_key.from_user.username as username %}You have been invited by {{ username }} to join {{ sitename }}!{% endblocktrans %}
{% trans "Go to" %} 
http://{{site.domain}}{% url 'registration_register' %}?invitation_key={{ invitation_key.key }}
{% trans "to join!" %}

{% blocktrans with site.name as sitename %}All the best,

The {{ sitename }} Team{% endblocktrans %}

 

Then just setup a cronjob calling the django command cleanupinvitation

to delete expired activation keys from the database.