My tutorial about creating ember.js applications with Django got updated to the latest ember.js version and the source code got published on github. I'm planning to write more about this framework soon, as now I'm spending a lot of time working with ember and Django, django-rest-framework and other interesting libraries. Aside of that I still have some topics on my ToDo list - Facebook apps related packages (future; when they get published), more Python + electronics tutorials, and Django/Python related (like checking Cherokee server or testing AppEnlight). What you find most interesting?

Although this is certainly not the usual use case for a Django site, I am deploying a new site that will be used by several programs at the school where I work. Each program will have its own specific Django settings file with its own values (for example, the database connection info) but for the most part the sites share a base settings_production.py file. Here is a sample of this file: from mysite.settings import * DEBUG = False TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG ALLOWED_HOSTS.append('.university.edu') INSTALLED_APPS.append( 'websso' ) MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.append( 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.RemoteUserMiddleware' ) AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS.append( 'websso.backends.RegistryRemoteUserBackend' ) DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2', 'NAME': os.environ.get('MYSITE_DB_NAME'), 'USER': os.environ.get('MYSITE_DB_USER'), 'PASSWORD': os.environ.get('MYSITE_DB_PASSWORD'), 'HOST': os.environ.get('MYSITE_DB_HOST'), 'PORT': '5432', } } As you can see, we get the database connection values from the environment. I am using Apache (with mod_proxy_uwsgi) and uwsgi in emperor mode to run the site, and each site has a uwsgi ini file that actually sets all the relevant per-site settings via the env configuration option. This was quite easy to set up, and this is an example uwsgi ini file: [uwsgi] chdir=/srv/myvirtualenv/mysite module=mysite.wsgi:application max-requests=5000 socket=127.0.0.1:3032 logto=/tmp/uwsgi-example.log env = DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings_production env = MYSITE_DB_NAME=mysite_dbname env = MYSITE_DB_USER=mysite_username env = MYSITE_DB_PASSWORD=abc123 env = MYSITE_DB_HOST=mysite-dbname.hostname.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com So far so good -- ...

Caleb Smith, Caktus developer, awarding the third place prize to TheRightFit creators Bipasa Chattopadhyay, Ping Fu, and Sarah Andrabi. Many congratulations to the PearlHacks third place winners who won Sphero Balls! The team from UNC’s Computer Science department created TheRightFit, an Android app that helps shoppers know what sizes will fit them and their families among various brands. Their prize of Sphero Balls, programmable balls that can interact and play games via smart phones, was presented by Caktus developer and Pearl Hacks mentor Caleb Smith as part of our sponsorship. PearlHacks, held at UNC-Chapel Hill, is a conference designed to encourage female high school and college programmers from the NC and VA area. Also, we’re deeply proud of our intern, Annie Daniel (UNC School of Journalism), who was part of the first place team for their application, The Culture of Yes. Excellent job, Annie! This is what Annie had to say about her team's first place project: The Culture of Yes was a web app that's meant to broaden the conversation on sexual assault on college campuses. We chose a flagship university from each of the 50 states, created a json file that summarized that university (population, male/female ratio, % ...

Thumbnails of website screenshots are a common visual design element. Search engines, such as Google, display webpage screenshots in their search results. Social news sites, such as DZone, embed screenshot thumbnails of shared pages. Bloggers and technology news sites embed screenshots of company websites and online services they discuss in their posts. Development companies embed screenshots of websites they helped develop. Embedding a screenshot in your website is quite a hassle. You’ll need to install a screen capture solution, browse to the web page in question, capture the relevant screen part, open the screenshot image in a graphic editor such as Photoshop, resize and crop the image, add borders and shadows, add arrows and other notation elements, save the resulting image file, upload the image to your CMS and embed it in the relevant HTML code. While manually creating a screenshot is somewhat time consuming, the challenges involved in dynamically generating perfect screenshots for many web pages are much more significant. In this blog post we wanted to explain how you can use Cloudinary with its new URL2PNG add-on to dynamically generate screenshots of any website. You can use Cloudinary's rich set of cloud-based image manipulation capabilities to resize the ...

Recently, we used Django REST Framework to build the backend for an API-first web application. Here I’ll attempt to explain why we chose REST Framework and how successfully it helped us build our software. Why Use Django REST Framework? RFC-compliant HTTP Response Codes Clients (javascript and rich desktop/mobile/tablet applications) will more than likely expect your REST service endpoint to return status codes as specified in the HTTP/1.1 spec. Returning a 200 response containing {‘status’: ‘error’} goes against the principles of HTTP and you’ll find that HTTP-compliant javascript libraries will get their knickers in a twist. In our backend code, we ideally want to raise native exceptions and return native objects; status codes and content should be inferred and serialised as required. If authentication fails, REST Framework serves a 401 response. Raise a PermissionDenied and you automatically get a 403 response. Raise a ValidationError when examining the submitted data and you get a 400 response. POST successfully and get a 201, PATCH and get a 200. And so on. Methods You could PATCH an existing user profile with just the field that was changed in your UI, DELETE a comment, PUT a new shopping basket, and so on. HTTP methods exist ...

Since few days we have Django 1.7 beta, which brings many changes including built in migrations system. At the company we have one quite new project that is still in development so we decided to use it as a guinea pig and use Django 1.7b1 for it. The upgrade from 1.6 wasn't that problematic, but it required some search-and-fix actions...

上周 Django 1.7 beta 1 released，这是Django 1.7正式版发布周期的一个重要里 […]

Django-filter is a powerful tool, but the documentation is a little sparse. If you want to see examples of custom Filters you have to dive into the source code. I recently wanted to add a filter for methods on a custom QuerySet. Unlike custom managers, custom QuerySets allow you to chain methods. You can read this introduction or refer to the official documentation (at the time of this writing 1.7 wasn't released yet). Here is a short example of what's possible: Product.products.in_stock().price_below(100).has_color('red') You get the idea, it's just a convenient way to write shorter code. So I had my methods and wanted to use them with django-filter, but it took a while to figure out how. After some digging I took the DateRangeField class as a blueprint (0.7 source) and came up with this filter: class QuerySetFilter(django_filters.ChoiceFilter): def __init__(self, options, *args, **kwargs): self.options = options kwargs['choices'] = [ (key, value[0]) for key, value in six.iteritems(self.options)] super(QuerySetFilter, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs) def filter(self, qs, value): method = self.options[value][1]['method'] if 'args' in self.options[value][1]: args = self.options[value][1]['args'] else: args = () if 'kwargs' in self.options[value][1]: kwargs = self.options[value][1]['kwargs'] else: kwargs = {} if method == '': return qs elif not hasattr(qs, method): raise Exception("Improperly configured", ...

Today I was adding tox and Travis-CI support to a Django project, and I ran into a problem: our project doesn’t have a setup.py. Of course I could have added one, but since by convention we don’t package our Django projects (Django applications are a different story) – instead we use virtualenv and pip requirements files - I wanted to see if I could make tox work without changing our project. Turns out it is quite easy: just add the following three directives to your tox.ini. In your [tox] section tell tox not to run setup.py: skipsdist = True In your [testenv] section make tox install your requirements (see here for more details): deps = -r{toxinidir}/dev-requirements.txt Finally, also in your [testenv] section, tell tox how to run your tests: commands = python manage.py test Now you can run tox, and your tests should run! For reference, here is a the complete (albeit minimal) tox.ini file I used: [tox] envlist = py27 skipsdist = True [testenv] deps = -r{toxinidir}/dev-requirements.txt setenv = PYTHONPATH = {toxinidir}:{toxinidir} commands = python manage.py test The post Using tox with Django projects appeared first on David Murphy.

I was recently working on a very CRUDy prototype and decided to use some Django applications and tools together I hadn't combined before: Django-tables2, an excellent application that allows you to quickly build tables Django-filter for easy filtering Django-crispy-forms for easy form creation A view that uses all three apps together could look like this: class FooTableView(TemplateView): template_name = 'myapp/foo_list.html' def get_queryset(self): return Foo.objects.all() def get_context_data(self, **kwargs): context = super(FooTableView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs) filter = FooFilter(self.request.GET, queryset=self.get_queryset()) filter.form.helper = FooFilterFormHelper() table = FooTable(filter.qs) RequestConfig(self.request).configure(table) context['filter'] = filter context['table'] = table return context While this is a basic example there's still a lot going on. The get_context_data method gets called automatically by the TemplateView and populates that template context with our filter and table objects. At first we create an instance of FooFilter and pass it the request's GET data, and the queryset to work on. The filter does what you'd expect and filters the queryset. The filter object also includes a form that's used to filter the data. We inject a crispy form helper to style the form. At last we create the table object based on our filtered queryset and configure it. Displaying everything on the frontend now becomes as easy ...

Django is renowned for being a powerful web framework with a relatively shallow learning curve, making it easy to get into as a beginner and hard to put down as an expert. However, when class-based generic views arrived on the scene, they were met with a lukewarm reception from the community: some said they were too difficult, while others bemoaned a lack of decent documentation. But if you can power through the steep learning curve, you will see they are also incredibly powerful and produce clean, reusable code with minimal boilerplate in your views.py. So to help you on your journey with CBVs, here are some handy tips I wish I had known when I first started learning all about them. This isn’t a tutorial, but more a set of side notes to refer to as you are learning; information which isn’t necessarily available or obvious in the official docs. Starting out If you are just getting to grips with CBVs, the only view you need to worry about is TemplateView. Don’t try anything else until you can make a ‘hello world’ template and view it on your dev instance. This is covered in the docs. Once you can handle ...

A year ago today Malcolm Tredinnick, core contributor to Django suddenly passed away. He was a mentor, and more importantly, a good friend. Here are some of my memories of Malcolm. DjangoCon US: September 2010 This is where Audrey and I first met Malcolm. We ended up spending a good amount of the conference with him just hanging out and having a good time. I remember being honored that such a luminary want to spend time with us, yet more importantly discovering a good friend. During the conference, he peered into the nascent code base of djangopackages.com and asked some pointed questions. We justified a few design decisions, and he nodded and we saw him using similar techniques later. He also gave us some great pointers on things we could do, and I believe we implemented all of them. Summer to Autumn of 2010 Malcolm and I worked together on a project in 2010. During this time we had a number of email and chat discussions. Going over them now I'm impressed by his friendship and generosity of knowledge. I know he was terribly busy but yet he always had time for me in 2010. After about emails where I ...

Learn what it takes to get common queries chain-able, and slimmer. This video goes over custom model managers and custom querysets so you can write better code, cleaner, code by harnessing the power of Django and OOP.Watch Now...

Website developers and administrators today tend to find themselves managing quite a few files, images and other media assets. Whether you upload content to your web application yourself, allow your users to upload files or have files imported from content partners, you'll need to handle the upload process, storage, and possibly thumbnail creation required to showcase your assets online. Many website developers consider moving their assets from hosted storage to cloud-based storage solutions. While somewhat costlier, these modern storage services offer nearly limitless scale and close to 100% uptime. To start using a cloud-based storage, you'll first need to migrate your existing images to the cloud. One way to go at it is to take a plunge, migrate all your existing images to the cloud and update your application to start uploading new images to cloud, going forward. You can use Cloudinary's upload APIs to simplify this process. Another option is to keep maintaining your images in your existing storage location(s), and use dynamic fetch URLs to let Cloudinary fetch these images on-demand, manipulate them on-the-fly and deliver these optimized to your visitors. Today, we wanted to introduce a new, powerful integration option - Cloudinary's new Automatic image uploading, which ...

I run a couple of sites that are based on Wordpress and my blog was one of them. There are several things that annoy me when it comes to Wordpress: too many plugins that you need for a good site updates, updates, updates (I merely spend my time in updating everything and keeping compatible) the Wordpress core code the themes HTML and structure that are PHP files it's PHP PHP-FPM consumes to much memory (if configured to serve a Wordpress site with good performance) So for my blog, which really is static but for the comments, I looked around what tools or frameworks are there to replace the mighty Wordpress with a static site. I wanted something simple, something pythonic. By reading the blogs of people who also had switched from Wordpress I found two tools: Hyde, a pythonic fork of Jekyll, and Pelican. The majority of people who switched chose Pelican, so I did, too. It has more forks on Github and also a repository of plugins. In fact both tools are not very different from each other. Pelican just felt better while using. The switch took me some days, I had a couple of problems to solve/things to ...

I run a couple of sites that are based on Wordpress and my blog was one of them. There are several things that annoy me when it comes to Wordpress: too many plugins that you need for a good site updates, updates, updates (I merely spend my time in updating everything and keeping compatible) the Wordpress core code the themes HTML and structure that are PHP files it's PHP PHP-FPM consumes to much memory (if configured to serve a Wordpress site with good performance) So for my blog, which really is static but for the comments, I looked around what tools or frameworks are there to replace the mighty Wordpress with a static site. I wanted something simple, something pythonic. By reading the blogs of people who also had switched from Wordpress I found two tools: Hyde, a pythonic fork of Jekyll, and Pelican. The majority of people who switched chose Pelican, so I did, too. It has more forks on Github and also a repository of plugins. In fact both tools are not very different from each other. Pelican just felt better while using. The switch took me some days, I had a couple of problems to solve/things to ...

Today I've released on Github one of my applications - django-content-bbcode. The parser code is used on my sites and I've decided to refactor it (it's quite old), add some new features (like the tag loader) and release it to the public. There is also pypi package for it. In short django-content-bbcode allows you to replace BBCode alike tags in text (like in articles, news) with whatever you code in Python. I use it to highlight code snippets (with pygments), make nice links to articles by given slug (fetches title, description from database), insert image thumbnails (integrated with frontend image lightbox) and few more. Makes plain text quite dynamic. More detailed description is on Github.

Knowing when a person last logged in is great, except when it isn't. Sometimes you want to know when a user last actually used your app. Since you can stay continually logged in to Django sites we need an alternative way to know when a person was last on your site. If you are using class based views, and you should, then writing a mixin is a good way to go. LastAccessMixin from django.utils import timezone class LastAccessMixin(object): def dispatch(self, request, *args, **kwargs): if user.is_authenticated(): user.accessdata.last_access = timezone.now() user.accessdata.save(update_fields=['last_access']) return super(LastAccessMixin, self).dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs) What Does this Code Do? The first place class based views go is to the disatch method. This "dispatches" the request to the proper place. It determines what type of a request it is be it a GET, POST, HEAD etc. From there it goes to the appropriate method. def dispatch(self, request, *args, **kwargs): We are overriding the dispatch method because it is always called, and only once. We also want to use the dispatch method instead of say get because on some urls we might use a post method, then we wouldn't know the page was used. if user.is_authenticated(): user.accessdata.last_access = timezone.now() user.accessdata.save(update_fields=['last_access']) In the ...

I have a simple video website for my kids and each kid has a separate login. This is so they can each have their own videos, but also so that some videos can be private (ie. hidden from the outside world, or other logged in users). I don't need crazy security though--it wouldn't be the end of the world if somehow someone guessed the magic token and saw some private videos, which are basically just home videos uploaded to Youtube. Videos that I really wouldn't want the public to see don't get uploaded to Youtube in the first place. I couldn't find how to do this easily, although one person on stackoverflow suggested "logging in the user in the view by calling login". The tricky part was figuring out that I had to set the User object's backend to 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend'. It's a bit of a hack, but it works, and it's simple. models.py: class MagicToken(models.Model): user = models.OneToOneField(User) magictoken = models.CharField(max_length=128, unique=True)   def __unicode__(self): return unicode(self.user) views.py: from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect, Http404 import django.contrib.auth.login   class MagicTokenLogin(View): def get(self, request, token): try: magic_token_obj = MagicToken.objects.get(magictoken=token) except MagicToken.DoesNotExist: raise Http404   user = magic_token_obj.user user.backend = 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend' django.contrib.auth.login(request, user) ...

Apple ships a patched version of OpenSSL with OS X. If no precautions are taken, their changes rob you of the power to choose your trusted CAs, and break the semantics of a callback that can be used for custom checks and verifications in client software. Abstract If OpenSSL’s certificate verification fails while connecting to a server, Apple’s code will intercept that error and attempt to verify the certificate chain itself with system trust settings from the keyring, potentially throwing away your verification results. Therefore: You can’t limit your trust to certain CAs using SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations. This apparently isn’t news but doesn’t appear to be widely known. Contrary to documentation, returning 0 from SSL_CTX_set_verify’s callback does not make the TLS handshake fail. That makes the callback unsuitable for extra verification purposes (such as hostname verification). MITRE has assigned CVE-2014-2234 for this issue. Apple was not interested in my bug report because they deprecated their OpenSSL years ago. Hence this summary together with work-arounds. The Verify Callback OpenSSL’s SSL_CTX_set_verify allows setting a callback function that is called for each certificate in the chain. It is invoked with the result of OpenSSL’s own verification of each certificate (1 for success, 0 for failure) ...

I'm maintaining my django-ckeditor fork known on PyPi as django-ckeditor-updated. It works with latest Django versions, uses Django file storage, has some new features and fixes. Recently few people including me got write access to the original repository - shaunsephton/django-ckeditor and my commits were merged (not that the PyPi package is still old). When/if the original package will get new and constant releases I'll close my fork, but until then django-ckeditor-update is alive. If you have any issues or pull requests made on the original django-ckeditor please check if they are still valid for current codebase.

he addition of this blog should help people learn more about Django, more often. For a while now there hs been set of things I have wanted to be on GoDjango, but didn't necesarily think they were enough for a full video, or too specific. Goals of the Blog The ultimate goal is to make GoDjango one of the top three places on the internet to come to in order to learn django. To accomplish that here are some of the goals I see for the blog. I hope to provide tutorials about django in a new way Provide more transparency about what is going on with the site instead of a one way stream of communication Provide another avenue of learning django so there are many more topics. About the Blog Eninge Itself This is a custom built blog engine I am creating for this site. However, I am creating it in an open way, but making it an installable app. I have named it dj-blog. The idea behind the installable app is to provide a basic blogging engine which is a bolt on, instead of something that almost takes over the entire code base. I plan to keep ...

The software used for this year's EuroPython conference website is actually a continuation of what was original developed by Markus Zapke-Gründemann and Stephan Jäkel for the very first PyConDE conference in Leipzig 2011. Over the years people joined/moved on but back then just as today the team has always been extremely small so we are always looking for people to help out. If you are in Berlin during the weekend of March 22 - March 23 or simply want to help with the project, there is a coding sprint for the software taking place in the offices of Veit Schiele Communications GmbH. Markus Holtermann will be there and I will join remotely from Graz (Austria) to answer all question you might have and or pair. In the next weeks until the sprint happens I will try to update the project's documentation (which is mostly still focused on the PyConDE-featureset) so that you will have a smoother start. For details please check out the page at meetup.com. If you want to take at the software first, you can find it on Github. "EuroPython Conference Software Sprint in Berlin" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons ...

Using things like CoffeeScript, Stylus, Less, SASS/SCSS, etc... Is becoming a more and more core part of development, but the problem usually is compiling these assets for use on our site. With django-pipeline this process is now much easier in both development and production. Learn the few easy steps it takes to get started with it.Watch Now...

Das nächste Treffen der Django-UserGroup Hamburg findet am Mittwoch, den 12.03.2014 um 19:30 statt. Dieses Mal treffen wir uns wieder in den Räumen der intosite GmbH im Poßmoorweg 1 (3.OG) in 22301 Hamburg. Die Organisation der Django-UserGroup Hamburg findet ab jetzt über Meetup statt. Um automatisch über zukünftige Treffen informiert zu werden, werdet bitte Mitglied in unserer Meetup-Gruppe: http://www.meetup.com/django-hh Für dieses Treffen ist ein Vortrag über Anpassungen im Django Admin geplant. Es werden Anpassungen gezeigt und erklärt, die über die dokumentierten Optionen hinausgehen. Bei Interesse kann ich außerdem ein wenig über erste Erfahrungen mit der Django 1.7 Alpha-Version und Mozilla-Circus als Prozessmanager berichten. 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 es auf unserer Webseite www.dughh.de.