Django community: Community blog posts RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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The Making Of The "Getting Started With Django" Music
The Making Of The "Getting Started With Django" Music -
Two Scoops of Django FAQ
The launch of the Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.5 book has gone pretty well. The response has been almost entirely positive and sales have been pretty brisk. We've gotten a ton of great, constructive editorial feedback, which we're sorting through as we race towards the BETA release. Here are answers to the commonly asked questions: When can I buy the book via PayPal? We will support PayPal in either the BETA or FINAL release of the book. In order to handle PayPal we need to find a reputable e-publisher that supports it that gives us similar rates, customer service, and product control (updates at any time, uploads of PDF, no surprise charges, etc) as Gumroad. If you know of an e-publisher who is willing to provide that same level of service, please let me know. For the record, we aren't leaving Gumroad. We just want to support developers and students who don't have credit cards. note: While we could certainly write our own publishing platform, that would delay work on the book. ;-) When can I get a Kindle (mobi) or ePub version? Our plan is to support those formats in either the BETA or FINAL ... -
Two Scoops of Django FAQ
The launch of the Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.5 book has gone pretty well. The response has been almost entirely positive and sales have been pretty brisk. We've gotten a ton of great, constructive editorial feedback, which we're sorting through as we race towards the BETA release. Here are answers to the commonly asked questions: When can I buy the book via PayPal? We will support PayPal in either the BETA or FINAL release of the book. In order to handle PayPal we need to find a reputable e-publisher that supports it that gives us similar rates, customer service, and product control (updates at any time, uploads of PDF, no surprise charges, etc) as Gumroad. If you know of an e-publisher who is willing to provide that same level of service, please let me know. For the record, we aren't leaving Gumroad. We just want to support developers and students who don't have credit cards. note: While we could certainly write our own publishing platform, that would delay work on the book. ;-) When can I get a Kindle (mobi) or ePub version? Our plan is to support those formats in either the BETA or FINAL ... -
From the Bazaar: Django and Sugar Labs
FOSS Experiences and Reflections* Update: Add section on my experiences with Sugar OS.Eric Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an intriguing look at the differences between the closed and open approaches in software development. Raymond defines the closed approach as being akin to building a cathedral, small teams or individual geniuses meticulously designing and crafting the software, but never sharing until the project is completed. The author contrasts this with the open source approach epitomized by the development of the Linux OS kernel. This style, labeled the bazaar style, is marked by its mix of different agendas & development approaches, soliciting and using contributions from people outside of the main development team, and releasing software and updates early and often. While the author clearly prefers the bazaar style of development, I still believe both approaches have a place in software development. One can point to many successful implementations of the bazaar approach like GIMP or Perl, and surely no one can deny the accomplishments of software cathedrals such as Apple's iOS or Mac OS X.After the brief introduction of the cathedral and bazaar concepts, Raymond proceeds to detail his stewardship over the open source program, fetchmail, and the development of Linux OS as ... -
Startups and Django
We've been working with more and more startups that are already using or have decided to use Django for their new web-based businesses. It's exciting. We've known for some time that Django is well suited for the kind of rapid iterations required for start-up firms. Now that ... -
Reusable Django Tests
Reusable Django Tests First of all, I think that testing should be accessible to everyone and should be simple enough to just "plug in" some automated tests for common patterns. Django does a pretty awesome job at encompassing applications. An application may be a blog, or a voting system, or one of many other components that require minimal configuration. These applications lower the barrier to writing larger systems. These applications come from the idea that a lot of these pieces share the same basic pieces across different projects, e.g. everyone's tagging system is going to support the same core necessities. What if we were able to identify common testing patterns and were able to generate tests that automatically introspect and make assertions about our app for us? Then we could just install a new application, apply some basic configuration, and boom! Instant tests without needing to actually write them yourself. I want to start tackling this problem and begin identifying patterns that can be extrapolated out into their own suite that is just installed and ready to go. Introducing: Proofread My first attempt at a solution to this is a project I've called proofread. Proofread tests the very basics of ... -
Reusable Django Tests
Reusable Django Tests First of all, I think that testing should be accessible to everyone and should be simple enough to just "plug in" some automated tests for common patterns. Django does a pretty awesome job at encompassing applications. An application may be a blog, or a voting system, or one of many other components that require minimal configuration. These applications lower the barrier to writing larger systems. These applications come from the idea that a lot of these pieces share the same basic pieces across different projects, e.g. everyone's tagging system is going to support the same core necessities. What if we were able to identify common testing patterns and were able to generate tests that automatically introspect and make assertions about our app for us? Then we could just install a new application, apply some basic configuration, and boom! Instant tests without needing to actually write them yourself. I want to start tackling this problem and begin identifying patterns that can be extrapolated out into their own suite that is just installed and ready to go. Introducing: Proofread My first attempt at a solution to this is a project I've called proofread. Proofread tests the very basics of ... -
Two Scoops of Django
Ahir vai acabar de llegir "Two Scoops of Django", el nou llibre, encara en versió Alfa que han tret DAniel Greenfeld i Audrey Roy. A diferència d'altres llibres que t'ensenyen a programar o et mostren el funcionanment d'un framework de programació, aquest llibre no és un tutorial per als no iniciats, sinó més bé una mena de consultoria de millors pràctiques en forma de llibre. Els autors "es banyen", recomanant utilitats i maneres de fer les coses per tal que els nostres projectes siguin més bons de desplegar i mantenir. Es recomanen llibreries externes per a facilitar-nos la vida: South, Virtualenv, Virtualenvwrapper (vells coneguts també per aquest blog) i fins i tot entra en la petital polèmica que hi ha damunt si és millor fer-ho tot amb CBV, fer una mescla o no fer-les servir. Puc dir que estic gairebé al 100% d'acord amb totes les recomanacions. Val a a dir que hem arribat a les mateixes conclusions que els autors en garebé tots els aspectes. Fins ara no feiem servir les variables d'entorn i és una cosa que de ben segur ens mirarem amb cura. Punts que potser estaria bé tractar o de discrepància: Nom del projecte. Personalment no ... -
Release 0.7.7
We just released LFS 0.7.7. This is a yet another bugfix release of the 0.7 branch. Changes Update: updated Czech translation (Radim Novotny). Update: updated Mexican translations (tzicatl). Improvement: Don't use more than one h1 tag on the product page but use h1 and h2 (Radim Novotny). Improvement: Show search query in the input box if there is any query. Also added pagination to the bottom of search results page (Radim Novotny). Bugfix: fixed calculation of discount net price within order; issue #36 Bugfix: fixed display of amount for discounts within management. Bugfix: fixed sorting handling for SOLR (Radim Novotny) Bugfix: fixed display of properties for locale. Bugfix: fixed calculation of 'calculated price' for different locales. Bugfix: fixed calculation and display of packings. Bugfix: fixed display of variant property values within products management. Information You can find more information and help on following locations: Documentation on PyPI Demo Releases on PyPI Source code on bitbucket.org and github. Google Group lfsproject on Twitter IRC -
Our Django Book Has Launched
We (Audrey Roy and I) wrote a book on Django! It's called Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.5, and you can buy it right now in e-book (PDF) form on the website: http://django.2scoops.org. Django, like any framework, has tips, tricks, and pitfalls that aren't documented in one place. Experienced developers know this stuff, but gleaning it off the Internet takes a lot of time. We decided to take everything we know and write it down. This book reflects a portion of what we documented, and if it does well we plan to follow it up with other references. If you've followed this blog or watched our talks you've know we've explained tons of Django and Python related examples. We enjoy using Django and Python to build stable, fast web applications quickly and efficiently. This is the book we would have wanted while learning the intricacies of our tools, and then kept it handy for reference. In the book we cover everything from customizing the Django 1.5 User model, forms, views, templates, security, bottleneck analysis and so much more. We tie in third-party packages from the Django and Python community. We discuss the positive patterns that allow for ... -
Our Django Book Has Launched
We (Audrey Roy and I) wrote a book on Django! It's called Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.5, and you can buy it right now in e-book (PDF) form on the website: http://django.2scoops.org. Django, like any framework, has tips, tricks, and pitfalls that aren't documented in one place. Experienced developers know this stuff, but gleaning it off the Internet takes a lot of time. We decided to take everything we know and write it down. This book reflects a portion of what we documented, and if it does well we plan to follow it up with other references. If you've followed this blog or watched our talks you've know we've explained tons of Django and Python related examples. We enjoy using Django and Python to build stable, fast web applications quickly and efficiently. This is the book we would have wanted while learning the intricacies of our tools, and then kept it handy for reference. In the book we cover everything from customizing the Django 1.5 User model, forms, views, templates, security, bottleneck analysis and so much more. We tie in third-party packages from the Django and Python community. We discuss the positive patterns that allow for ... -
Our Django Book is Finished
We (Audrey Roy and I) wrote a book on Django! It's called Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.5, and you can buy it right now in e-book (PDF) form on the website: http://django.2scoops.org. Django, like any framework, has tips, tricks, and pitfalls that aren't documented in one place. Experienced developers know this stuff, but gleaning it off the Internet takes a lot of time. We decided to take everything we know and write it down. This book reflects a portion of what we documented, and if it does well we plan to follow it up with other references. If you've followed this blog or watched our talks you've know we've explained tons of Django and Python related examples. We enjoy using Django and Python to build stable, fast web applications quickly and efficiently. We've also worked This is the book we would have wanted while learning the intricacies of our tools, and then kept it handy for reference. In the book we cover everything from customizing the Django 1.5 User model, forms, views, templates, security, bottleneck analysis and so much more. We tie in third-party packages from the Django and Python community. We discuss the positive patterns ... -
Our Django Book is Launched
We (Audrey Roy and I) wrote a book on Django! It's called Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.5, and you can buy it right now in e-book (PDF) form on the website: http://django.2scoops.org. Django, like any framework, has tips, tricks, and pitfalls that aren't documented in one place. Experienced developers know this stuff, but gleaning it off the Internet takes a lot of time. We decided to take everything we know and write it down. This book reflects a portion of what we documented, and if it does well we plan to follow it up with other references. If you've followed this blog or watched our talks you've know we've explained tons of Django and Python related examples. We enjoy using Django and Python to build stable, fast web applications quickly and efficiently. We've also worked This is the book we would have wanted while learning the intricacies of our tools, and then kept it handy for reference. In the book we cover everything from customizing the Django 1.5 User model, forms, views, templates, security, bottleneck analysis and so much more. We tie in third-party packages from the Django and Python community. We discuss the positive patterns ... -
Django Suite IV: Hablemos un poco de caché.
Decía Phil Karlton "Solo hay dos cosas dificiles en las ciencias de la computación: invalidación de caché y nombrar cosas." En esta entrega de la serie Django Suite - después de mas de un año de ausencia - hablaré sobre el framework de caché de Django. Principios de caché Cuando hacemos un sitio, especialmente si estamos comenzando no tomamos en cuenta el desempeño del sitio y la cantidad de tiempo de procesamiento por cada petición. El tiempo de procesamiento de un sitio está afectado por varios factores el mas importante la cantidad de consultas que realizamos a la base de dato por cada request, generalmente estas varían según la complejidad de nuestras vistas y el tipo de usuario (anónimo o autenticado) que tengamos en el sitio. Para mejorar el desempeño del sitio se usa el caché que no es mas que un almacenamiento rápido, generalmente en RAM, que nos evita recaer en operaciones de cálculo pesadas como lo son hacer muchas consultas de base de datos la lógica de las vistas y el renderizado de las mismas en la plantilla que normalmente son realizadas haciendo lectura/escritura de disco duro que agrega mas tiempo a la receta. Hacer caché de datos ... -
Open Source Projects and Thoughts
My FOSS Preferences*Update: Added link to post on The Cathedral and The Bazaar and installing and using a FOSS project.During this semester teams of four students will be responsible for joining an existing open source community and contributing to the community in a meaningful way such as bug fixes or documentation updates. However before the teams are formed, each student is to select three potential projects and give a description of the projects, and what about the project interests the student. My three selections are: Sugar Lab, Django, and Open Medical Records System (OpenMRS).I have prior experience with two of the projects, OpenMRS and Django. During CSCI 362 - Software Engineering my team and I developed an automated unit testing framework for OpenMRS. On various occasions I have I employed various web application frameworks for development of websites, with Django becoming my currently preferred framework due to my enjoyment of the Python language.While I have only recently started using Python (CofC CS students use Python in the introductory CS course, but my introductory course at Clemson was taught in Java), I am rapidly becoming an ardent fan. Maybe not as much as Randall Munroe, but very close.Image attribution: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/python.pngSugar Labs is an open source educational platform. The ... -
About selecting CFP ( from a conference geek)
Me in the backstage of djangoday 2012 I had the joy of organizing a couple of conf with my fellows of WebDeBs. After been an attendee in many conferences and a speaker at some of them it has been a very nice and playful experience be in the staff. This Year I submitted a CFP for the DjangoCon.eu. They had a fancy and democratic way of selecting CFPs: Anonymise submissions, to eliminate -
Winds of Change
In my previous post I mentioned that 2013 would be a year of change. Well, here is the moment to say why that will be so: I have quit Igalia. Igalia is a very special company to me, I joined it in December 2008. These were 4 intense years where I saw how the company evolved, how it moved to a cool new office, how it grew and I learned a lot in there. I had the chance to participate in several important projects like Maemo or Meego and also to create others. I could even tell the world about them in the many conferences I spoke at and I am also proud to have accomplished things such as putting the company’s name for the first time in the highlights of online media like ArsTechnica. So the question people always ask is: why did I leave!? As some of you may know, Igalia is organized in a flat structure where we take more responsibilities than just coding and the ultimate part of a career in the company is to become a partner. I knew this when I joined and I think this is a wonderful thing. Being at the end ... -
Switching to pip for Python deployments
For the last year or so addons.mozilla.org and marketplace.firefox.com have deployed primarily by pulling the entire project out of github. Required libraries were placed in a git submodule called vendor. Vendor was then a git submodule of our project, meaning we had recursive submodules. At deployment time we recursively pulled all the modules from github to our master server. This created a few issues. The recursive pull from github was quite slow as we pulled down an awful lot of code. To update something in vendor was quite a tortuous path of updates that generated quite a few expletives from most developers the first few times they tried it. Scripts were written to make that made it easier, but that was just addressing the symptom. Multiple commits appeared in zamboni that had accidental vendor changes in the submodule and more expletives were uttered. Because everything ended up underneath the main project anything that recursively searched directories took longer. Some git commands, greps, test runs etc took longer and longer as the vendor library grew. Finally, building packages and using pypi and the existing community infrastructure is a good thing. It means that our code is as close to as normal ... -
The Definitive Answer, Explained
Yesterday I posted that Django was almost certainly suitable to use for your project. Here's my explanation of my one-word answer, with my views on how your non-technical business should make technical decisions. (Hint: You shouldn't) -
The Definitive Answer, Explained
Yesterday I posted that Django was almost certainly suitable to use for your project. I've had some minor push-back, so I thought I'd explain a little. When beginning a project, many businesses appear to spend an inordinate amount of time making technical decisions that are often outside their area of expertise. One such decision might be from a small business owner wanting to decide whether to build their shopping cart with Django, Rails, or PHP. The hard truth is that for the most part, this decision doesn't matter. All three of the above can be used to successfully build exactly the sort of shopping cart that you want, no matter how bespoke. An article I came across this week talked about the same theme but in a different context. It's by Forbes' Gene Marks, and is titled What Salesforce.com Won't Tell You. The message here is that no matter what CRM solution you implement, you'll get results if you implement it well - and that means getting the right people to build/design it, getting your staff on board, and making sure somebody owns the system. This applies to your website project, too. Ensure somebody at your company owns the website ... -
The Definitive Answer To "Can I Use Django For This Project?"
Short: Yes. Longer: Almost certainly. If you don't know any technical reason why Django isn't a good fit, then Django is probably a good fit. -
The Definitive Answer To "Can I Use Django For This Project?"
Short: Yes. Longer: Almost certainly. If you don't know any technical reason why Django isn't a good fit, then Django is probably a good fit. -
Einladung zur Django-UserGroup Hamburg am 09. Januar
Das nächste Treffen der Django-UserGroup Hamburg findet am Mittwoch, den 09.01.2013 um 19:30 statt. Dieses Mal treffen wir uns wieder in den Räumen der intosite GmbH im Poßmoorweg 1 (3.OG) in 22301 Hamburg. Da wir in den Räumlichkeiten einen Beamer zur Verfügung haben hat jeder Teilnehmer die Möglichkeit einen kurzen Vortrag (Format: Lightning Talks oder etwas länger) zu halten. Konkrete Vorträge ergeben sich erfahrungsgemäß vor Ort. Eingeladen ist wie immer jeder der Interesse hat sich mit anderen Djangonauten auszutauschen. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich, hilft aber bei der Planung. Weitere Informationen über die UserGroup gibt auf unserer Webseite www.dughh.de. -
Pyramid experiment, (temporarily) no Django
I'm currently experimenting with a pyramid site at work. Why not Django, which we use for everything else? (For Pyramid, see a summary of a Dutch Python usergroup meeting talk about Pyramid.) Current situation: well-structured collection of Django apps Well, our current system (called Lizard) is a big structured collection of Django apps. "Lizard-ui" is an app with base python views (class based views) and base templates for the UI and a whole bunch of css (bootstrap-based) and javascript (jquery, openlayers, lots of extras). This gives you a generic layout with a header, sidebar, the correct colors. Lots of stuff to make it easy to quickly build your project (once you buy into the basic structure and learn to work with it). "Lizard-map" builds upon lizard-ui and adds map views. Geographical information. Some "adapter mechanism" that basically provides an interface to connect any kind of data source to our map mechanism. There are quite a lot of data sources that we've mapped to maps this way. Rendering it, querying, returning a location's CSV data, a location's flot/matplotlib graph, combining various data sources, etc. Great to get going, but you do have to get to know the underdocumented interface. And it ... -
Django 1.5 release candidate
Django 1.5 release candidate
