Show HN: Our Django Dash project: Proposalmatic | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Our Django Dash project: Proposalmatic

proposalmatic.dwaiter.com

38 pointsstevelosh10 comments

For this year's Django Dash three of us made a little web app to help freelancers and small companies manage proposals to clients. Maybe some of you would find it useful.

The code is at https://bitbucket.org/dwaiter/proposalmatic if you're interested. Warning: there are definitely a few messy sections since it was built in two days.

Thanks! It actually looks pretty great for something put together in the span of 48 hours.

(But I think you guys forgot to filter the proposal queryset by account in the SnippetForm.)

Yeah, that queryset could be filtered. It's not really a security risk though -- the worst someone could do is make one of their own custom snippets not appear in their own library.

I'm interested in why you opted for a name tied to such a specific use case.

Surely there are lots of other document types where this kind of service could come in handy. Briefly and just off the top of my head: CVs/résumés, marketing mailshots, blog posts...

Was it an intentional choice to try and limit the scope of the application?

You're definitely right -- the concept can be used in lots of other places. We talked about this a bunch, and decided that we'd stick with proposals.

If we tried to make the user interface general enough to support any kind of document it would get more complicated. Off the top of my head, we'd need:

    * Arbitrary keywords, not just "client names".
    * More help text to explain how things work, give examples, etc.
    * Probably some more options for the layout of the result, like "show date".

We decided to go with the "do one thing well" approach partly to avoid this extra UI complexity, partly because we only had 48 hours to make it, and partly because "Proposalmatic" is a much cooler/stronger name than "Document-maker".

The site could be easily forked, reskinned and set up for another type of document though. It really fits perfectly with the resume idea -- I hadn't thought of that particular case before. Maybe we should make a "Resume-o-matic" sister site.

I was thinking about marriage proposals when I got to the page.

"Use ProposalMatic to save snippets of text that you use often and mix and match to create personalized proposals" This really struck me as odd...

Hah, not sure marriage proposals are something I'd want to automate...

And yeah, the copy wasn't number one on the todo list. We'll clean it up and flesh it out once the sites are unfrozen from the judging process.

Possibly a naive question but: did you use a css template or something to make that design? I have a hell of a time making sites look that great in 48 hrs...

Nope, no CSS template, just raw code. A lot of it is CSS3, and LESS (http://lesscss.org/) makes coding it all much quicker.

As far as I know Sawyer did it all from scratch. I'll see if I can get him to answer here.

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