added a few tests

@gustafsonk  this adds some basic tests to get the coverage up. i merged your changes from master into this, and i'll update master with the develop branch once this is reviewed. sorry that the django version upgrade caused an import error. if these tests existed, it would have been caught earlier. it would be ideal to have the coverage up to 100%, but i wanted to at least get something in place to help prevent issues like that as more people work on this project. this only took about an hour last week to get the coverage from 0% to 92%, so it shouldn't be too difficult for someone else to complete it.

@jrajav Feel free to review this as well