OpenBlock, explained.

OpenBlock is a hyperlocal news platform. It provides a local news database with various kinds of news, each with a location, a date, and any other information you want. You can use it principally in two ways:

• As a standalone website where users can browse by location, right down to the single block level, by date, or by kind of news.
• As a service you integrate with other websites through a REST API, custom RSS feeds, or custom widgets you embed in your pages.

Or both.

OpenBlock began life as the everyblock.com codebase. The two projects now proceed independently, but amicably. For more history, see the documentation and the EveryBlock archive.

You do not want to do that. OpenBlock is not a content management system. It is good for aggregating and filtering hyperlocal news. Lots of content does not make sense as hyperlocal news.

As of August 2011, OpenBlock is in beta. That said, the codebase was quite mature when everyblock.com initially released it, because it had already been used to run everyblock.com in production for some time.

The final 1.0 release was expected by September 2011. The release notes record how the project moved on to version 1.1.0 in October 2011.

OpenBlock is developed by OpenPlans, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with funding from the Knight Foundation.

Start with the documentation. If you get stuck, ask for help on the project channels. The team was still actively working on making installation and setup significantly easier.

Be warned that several parts of OpenBlock assume US addresses. People were trying to set it up in Canada and Spain, but there are stumbling blocks. Ask for help before committing to a deployment outside the United States.

Stable packages are on PyPI. Follow the installation instructions. Developers can check out the code from GitHub.

If you are setting up OpenBlock for its API or widget capabilities and want to integrate it with an existing website, you will probably feed in data you already have. If you are setting it up as an aggregator of hyperlocal news, this may be your biggest challenge. Availability of regularly updated local data varies a lot from place to place.

Almost anything you can find on the web. OpenBlock has infrastructure for dealing with various data formats: RSS and Atom feeds with or without geographic extensions, CSV files, and screen scraping HTML websites. Data can even be scraped from PDFs. This requires some Python scripting. See the scraper tutorial.

Alternatively, OpenBlock includes a simple REST API that allows pushing news into the system over HTTP.

In the United States, consider using TIGER Line data from the US Census Bureau. See the geographic data documentation.

No. There are no plans at this time for offering OpenBlock as a hosted service.

OpenBlock is heavily geared toward displaying information that happened in one particular place at one particular time. In a word, news. If you have data that has a location but no meaningful date, you can create Places and categorize them using PlaceTypes. These will be optionally displayed as markers on some maps. This is not fully documented yet.

No, that does not really make sense. If it does not have a date and a location, it is not local and it is not news, and it does not make sense for OpenBlock.