

Show HN: Our Django Dash project: Proposalmatic - stevelosh
http://proposalmatic.dwaiter.com/

======
stevelosh
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.

~~~
roam
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.)

~~~
stevelosh
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.

------
philbo
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?

~~~
stevelosh
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.

------
ulf
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...

~~~
stevelosh
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.

------
scotto
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...

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

