Bow Valley SPCA Website
May 26, 2025 ยท View on GitHub
The Bow Valley SPCA's mission is to provide the community with an adoption centre following a no kill, no cage philosophy to shelter, care for and re-home stray and abandoned dogs and cats and promote humane attitudes and responsible pet companionship through educational programs and community leadership.
Sponsorship of the website build has been provided by the Calgary Foundation and Blue Hut. Read more here
The code for the website is open source and other SPCAs, in particular, are encouraged to make use of the code as they see fit.
Key Website Features
- Easy to use content editing interface
- Supports news, events, team and general content management for the centre
- Integrates with PetPoint data management system for a feed of adoptable animals at the centre
- Animal data retrieved from PetPoint is stored locally to the website
to allow:
- end-users to interact with animal information directly on the website
- improved social interactions with the website via Facebook and email marketing
- improved SEO
- ability to allow additional content to be associated with animals that is not supported by PetPoint
- Automated posting of new and recently adopted animals to Facebook
- Automated regular email listing new arrivals and recently adopted animals
Technical Overview
The website is built with Wagtail and Django.
Experience with either Django or Wagtail will be required to make use of this code.
Code structure based on cookiecutter-django
Django Apps
core
animals
The animals app provides the main functionality for displaying animals available for adoption. The app is based around using PetPoint (http://www.petpoint.com/) for managing animal data. It provides a Django management command to synchronize current adoptable animals in the PetPoint data management system with an 'Animal' Wagtail page model.
A PETPOINT_AUTH_KEY environment variable needs to be set to enable access to the PetPoint SOAP API.
Photo galleries on the animal details page use Featherlight jQuery lightbox plugin.
The animals app can easily be modified for rescue centres that do not use PetPoint by modifying the Wagtail Animal page model to suit their specific requirements.
newsletter
The newsletter app provides a management command to construct and send a weekly newsletter listing recently arrived and adopten animals. The newsletter is published via MailChimp.
The newsletter includes:
- animals arrived in the last 14 days
- animals adopted in the last 14 days
social
The social app provides a simple queue where pages can be appended for later posting to social media. A management command is run to dequeue items and post them to Facebook.
Pages implementing the SocialMediaPostable abstract class can be added to the queue. Currently only the Animal page model implements this.
Deployment
Evironment Variables
The following environment variables need to be available in production and local environments. They
can be made available in .env.production and .env.local files in the project root where they are read
at startup in config/settings/base.py.
| Name | App | Example | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| HOME | home/bvspca | Project root | |
| DJANGO_SECRET_KEY | |||
| DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE | config.settings.production | ||
| DJANGO_ADMIN_URL | r'my-secret-django-admin-path' | Defaults to 'djadmin' in development | |
| DATABASE_URL | |||
| PATH | $PATH:/home/bvspca/BVSPCA/bin | Python virtual environment | |
| WAGTAIL_ADMIN_URL | r'my-secret-wagtail-admin-path' | Defaults to 'admin' in development | |
| RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY | Google Recaptcha | ||
| RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY | Google Recaptcha | ||
| GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID | core | ||
| ADDTHIS_PUB_ID | core | ||
| MAILCHIMP_USERNAME | newsletter | Required by 'newsletter' app | |
| MAILCHIMP_SECRET_KEY | newsletter | Required by 'newsletter' app | |
| MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID | newsletter | 83c4276af1 | MailChimp list ID that newsletter will be distributed to |
| MAILCHIMP_TEMPLATE_ID | newsletter | 351313 | MailChimp template ID that newsletter will be created with |
| MAILCHIMP_SUBJECT | newsletter | Subject line of email | |
| MAILCHIMP_FROM_NAME | newsletter | From name of email | |
| MAILCHIMP_REPLY_TO | newsletter | Reply to address of email | |
| PETPOINT_AUTH_KEY | animals | PetPoint Authorization Key | |
| WAGTAILADMIN_NOTIFICATION_FROM_EMAIL | Admin From email | ||
| FACEBOOK_PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN | social | Facebook page access token | |
| FACEBOOK_PAGE_ID | social | Facebook page id | |
| FB_PIXEL_ID | core |
Development Commands
Code Style Checks
$ flake8 bvspca
Tests
$ pytest bvspca
$ pytest bvspca --reuse-db # reuses the existing test db
$ pytest bvspca --create-db # forces the test db to be recreated
$ pytest bvspca -f # watches for changes if pytest-xdist installed
Live reloading, Sass compilation and JS bundling
$ npm start
Production Sass compilation and JS bundling
$ npm run build
Manage.py Cron Jobs Summary
| Command | Required by | Suggested Frequency | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| clearsessions | django | daily | |
| publish_scheduled_pages | wagtail | every hour | |
| sync_petpoint_data | animals app | every 30 minutes | |
| send_newsletter | newsletter app | weekly | |
| post_social_media | social app | daily |