Introduction
This documentation is still very much a work in progress. Any questions not answered here, feel free to reach out or check out the reference documentation.
Welcome to Theater Admin Portal
This Django web application is created specifically for use by performing arts centers in order to address their unique human resources and efficiency needs. The end goal of this project is to have a start to finish portal for users to see their schedule and for managers to be able to communicate effectively with different groups of employees. The efficiencies available will become more clear as I describe them below.
In most theaters/PAC's there are regular emails sent out, but they are often many separate emails that are limited to a specific team or department with very different information required of each: (production, actors, creative, direcotrs, etc.). Even reports for performances and rehearsals (that are often only sent to production) could be made more efficient by allowing users to go in and see notes only for themselves or their department rather than the whole team. There is also an added benefit of having a database of users who have worked at the institution in the past that could be immediately referenced and recalled if necessary.
Eventually, because Django allows expansion rather easily, I would like to add in usefully features like timecard tracking and shift scheduling.
Moving forward, I would like to integrate features that are usefull to see under the same system, but I do not want to re-create features that already work well somewhere else. For example: Google Calendar already exists and works well to manage events. Rather than creating events twice, I would much prefer to import/sync events from an external calendar or even a .csv file, and then have TAP manage the event from there, like sending out reminders based on the event, or creating a TODO item, etc. Maybe even TAP would manage sharing so the calendar is shared with everyone involved. Hopefully that makes sense. In this example, I find it unlikely that creating a whole new calendering system would benefit users and would be user friendly enough. Thats how I am hoping to approach adding in new features to this system.
Contributing
Any suggestions or ideas are very much welcome!
Next up in this project is probably docs, and giving another once over for the tests.
I would also like to add in Rehearsal/Show reporting for management to send out reports. Theoretically, users would be automatically notified and be able to log in and filter notes to only see those relevent to them, or if they prefer they can see all of the notes. Commenting on each report is pretty important as well. If you have no idea what kind of reports I am talking about, I can send you an example of what I mean.
You can follow instructions above to run in development locally. Sample data is in tests/sample_data_for_demo.py file.
Creating a pull request will also create a review app if you would like to test your changes in a production environment. Be aware though that review apps use the development settings, so checking on things like email notifications might not be super helpful.
Questions!
Feel free to let me know if there are any questions or suggestions! You can see the info site at: www.theaterportal.app and the demonstration site at: demo.theaterportal.app