OpenBlock is a web application that allows users to browse and search their local area for “hyper-local news” - to see what’s going on recently in the immediate geographic area.
OpenBlock is a hyperlocal news platform. What we mean by that is that, at its essence, OpenBlock is a web application (and web service) that stores two kinds of information:
OpenBlock allows you to explore that data in various ways: by geographic area, small or large; by type of news; by various categories relevant to the types of news you have; by text search; or by any combination of the above.
News in OpenBlock is stored as NewsItems. In essence, a NewsItem is just something that happened at one time and one place. Each NewsItem stores a timestamp, a geographic point, a title, a description, and a few other generic fields.
Each NewsItem also has a type, which we call its Schema. Schemas are used to classify NewsItems and allow them to have extra searchable, type-specific data.
For example: an OpenBlock site might provide both police reports and restaurant inspections. There would be one Schema representing police reports, allowing each police report to store information about what kinds of crime were committed. There would be a second Schema representing restaurant inspections, and it would allow each inspection report to say whether the restaurant failed or passed, what violations were observed, and so on.
All this can be configured by the site administrator without writing code.
A user is then able to browse NewsItems that are only police reports, or only restaurant inspections, or both; or browse only failed restaurant inspections; or browse crimes of a certain type, in a certain location, during a certain time period; et cetera.
There is a where you can experiment with similar searches.
OpenBlock began life as the open-source code released by in June 2009. Originally created by Adrian Holovaty and the Everyblock team, it has been rebranded OpenBlock to avoid trademark infringement, and is now developed as an open-source (GPL) project at .
Funding for both the and the was provided by the .
OpenBlock code is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
A few modules were borrowed from other packages with other free software licenses, e.g. “Modified BSD”-style licenses; these are identified as such in the source code.
This documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
This is a Django application, so it’s highly recommended that you have familiarity with the Django Web framework. The best places to learn are the official and the free .
Before you dive in, it’s highly recommended you spend a little bit of time browsing around and/or to get a feel for what this software does.
Also, for a light conceptual background on some of this, particularly the data storage aspect of ebpub, watch the video “Behind the scenes of EveryBlock.com” here: