PANDA: A Newsroom Data Appliance 1.1.0

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.

Note

Are you a reporter? Documentation for users can be found at the PANDA Project Cookbook.

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.

Administration

Authors

The PANDA Board:

  • Brian Boyer
  • Joe Germuska
  • Ryan Pitts

Lead Developer:

  • Christopher Groskopf

Contributors:

  • Dane Springmeyer
  • David Eads
  • Niran Babalola
  • Justin Edwards
  • Daniel Lathrop
  • Jennifer Wilson

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

1.1.0

  • Add getting started guide to home page. (#901)
  • Implement demo mode. (#902)
  • Fix default search operator in global search. (#877)
  • Enable column sort in API. (#876)
  • Add Jennifer Wilson to AUTHORS.
  • Add Daniel Lathrop to AUTHORS.
  • Fix url parsing issue breaking Firefox. (#870)
  • Update to Django 1.4.8. (#882)
  • Integrate German (DE) translation. (#865)
  • Implement translation (i18n) support. (#861, etc.)

1.0.2

  • Fix bug preventing datasets with related uploads from being deleted. (#862)
  • Escape queries when URLs are passed via hrefs. (#867)
  • Workaround obscure Firefox url decoding issue. (#863)
  • Prevent long dataset descriptions from overflowing. (#864)
  • Fix local development installation script for Solr.
  • Fix bug causing dates in XLS files to be imported as numbers.
  • Fix unescaped names in subscription dialogs. (#858)

1.0.1


  • Improve security implemention to prevent API key theft. (#201)
  • Notifications list fixed in IE9. (#822)
  • Fix for searching categories with many datasets. (#849)
  • Fixed broken cross-dataset export link. (#848)
  • Fixed broken export links in email. (#847)
  • Added version number to admin and dashboard. (#845)

1.0.0

  • Proper error messages when a search fails. (#600)
  • Upgrade to Django 1.4.1 security release.
  • Wrote new user documentation at pandaproject.net.
  • Remove nginx file size upload limitation. (#832)
  • Stale data in Solr indexes will no longer break search. (#793)
  • Add form for adding users in bulk to admin. (#762)
  • Fix broken Change Password and Logout buttons on admin pages. (#795)
  • Implement global search results export. (#788)
  • Increase uWSGI buffer size to prevent overflows. (#792)
  • Fix emails so they can be longer than 30 characters. (#789)
  • Add “Related Links” section to dataset pages. (#763)
  • Make progress bars degrade gracefully in IE. (#426)
  • Ensure new pages always begin scrolled to the top. (#790)
  • Fix broken export links in notifications. (#783)
  • Fix so that hitting enter in modal dialogs submits the form. (#781)
  • Add descriptions for data and related uploads. (#757)
  • Fix major bug in IE8 with handling encoding errors. (#688)
  • Upgrade all deployments to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release. (#684)
  • User login cookies now last 30 days. (#639)
  • Reword “Column filters” to be easier to understand. (#591)
  • Major performance improvements for user pages. (#778)
  • Automatically match nicknames in search. (#761)
  • Search for data within dataset categories. (#760)
  • Add links to data exports to user pages. (#759)
  • Implement “Text” column filter. (#758)
  • Make modal dialogs focus first form field on open. (#674)
  • Fix display of notifications in navbar. (#749)
  • Datasets are no longer locked for editing during exports. (#659)
  • PANDA instances now have unique SECRET_KEYS for added security. (#465)
  • A password confirmation is now required to edit a user profile. (#677)
  • Datasets with aborted imports no longer appear broken. (#705)
  • Add refresh page link to dataset import status alerts. (#738)
  • Fix search subscription text when not using any full-text query (#747)
  • Add delete button for data uploads (also deletes data imported from that upload). (#754)
  • Improve appearance of the dashboard. (#765)
  • Eliminate default accounts and demo mode. (#769)
  • Implement “Welcome to PANDA” setup page. (#752)

0.2.0

  • Implement automated search notifications. (#703)
  • Add landing pages for exports so they use the login logic. (#711)
  • Prompt for metadata during upload. (#710)
  • Add a human-readable description to tasks in the admin. (#709)
  • Fix longstanding bug where task error notifications may fail. (#700)
  • Add row count to import and reindex notification emails. (#697)
  • Fix filters so it is possible to search for a zero. (#696)
  • Add “Resend activation code” button to User admin pages. (#690)
  • Escape dataset names on User pages. (#685)
  • Reorganize import errors to be more readable. (#617)
  • Don’t disable dataset search during import. (#483)
  • Update dataset full text when a user’s name is changed via the admin. (#351)
  • Update dataset full text when a user’s name is changed via the API. (#350)
  • Handle SMTP connection errors gracefully. (#335)
  • Normalize API behavior for Notications. (#237)
  • Fix bug where column filters could not be searched alone. (#694)
  • Fix bug where column filter ranges would not display. (#695)
  • Warn when uploading a file if low on storage space. (#693)
  • Add “Abort” link to TaskStatus admin page. (#419)

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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