Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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The Buddha Website wins two Webby Awards
I am excited to announce that The Buddha site won two Webby Awards! It was built in partnership with Sonnet Media as a companion to The Buddha documentary directed by David Grubin that aired on PBS in April 2010. The site was built using Django to create a multi layered interactive experience to further explore ... -
ST_Simplify(provided by PostGIS) and GeoDjango
ST_Simplify function is provided by PostGIS.It is used to simplify the geometry(eg. LINESTRING or POLYGON).It use `simplify` method of GEOSGeometry class.Django version is 1.3.>>> line_string.simplify?Type: instancemethodBase Class: <type 'instancemethod'>String Form: <bound method LineString.simplify of <LineString object at 0xa4ed5f0>>Namespace: InteractiveFile: /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Django-1.3-py2.6.egg/django/contrib/gis/geos/geometry.pyDefinition: line_string.simplify(self, tolerance=0.0, preserve_topology=False)...>>> line_string<LineString object at 0xa4ed5f0>>>> len(line_string)4367>>> line_string[:3][(138.67654300000001, 35.492500999999997, 944.62300000000005), (138.676545, 35.4925, 944.62300000000005), (138.676546, 35.492499000000002, 944.63)]>>> simplified = line_string.simplify(0.001)>>> len(simplified)90>>> simplified2 = line_string.simplify(0.001, True)>>> len(simplified2)2458 -
AppHosted.com Django Hosting Service Review
This post is the fourth in my series about the new Django hosting services that just recently hit the market. Previously I have reviewed ep.io , gondor.io , and dotCloud.com .This post reviews AppHosted.com , another similar service that is currently in beta. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak of this service before it was released to the general public, and here are my notes and impressions for the short time I had to play with the new service. Overview AppHosted.com uses a similar concept as the other django hosting services, they provide you with a command line client called metro that you use to interact with the service. Like the other command line clients, it is pretty much just a nice wrapper around their API, so anything you can do with the metro client you can do with their API. The client is used to configure your service and push your files up into their servers. Once the application is created and your code has been uploaded to their server, you can use their web based control panel to configure or manage your application. So that we can compare apples to apples I will go through … -
Django Job Opening @ CashStar.com (Portland, ME)
I work for a company called CashStar, most people have never heard of us, but a lot of people have used our products without even knowing it. CashStar is the man behind the curtain so to speak. We created an e-gift card platform that is used by some of the largest companies in the United States. Here is a short list of some of our customers: The Home Depot, Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Staples, Coach, Starbucks, CVS, Chilis, Regal Cinemas, Pottery Barn, The CheeseCake Factory, Dell, Pizza Hut, and many more. To see the full list follow this link: http://www.cashstar.com/all-egift-card-clients/ Another thing that most people don't know is that we power that platform using the awesome python framework called Django. Using Python and Django, our small engineering team in Portland, Maine has taken our startup which didn't exist 3 years ago and turned it into a leader in the electronic gift card market. Due to this phenomenal growth, we need to expand our engineering team. We are currently looking for developers as well as QA folks to join our team. You will need to work on site in Portland Maine, and be legally allowed to work in the United … -
What is VPKG?
VPKG is a package manager for Django base web applications, that provide an easy way to managing current installed applications. The main idea behind the VPKG is to provide a dpkg like package manager for Vanda Platform and other web application that written using Django. Admin user can easily add a new application to the [...] -
Conference schedule posted
Conference schedule posted It has been a while and a lot has happened. We’re past due for an update! Talks The conference schedule has been finalized; we are proud to present an interesting program on a wide variety of Django subjects. You can now also submit entries for the lightning talks on the lightning talks page Waiting list The waiting list is full. Starting May 18th we will invite people who have subscribed to the waiting list on a first-come, first-served basis. We’re also pleased to announce that the higher “Night Owl” rate has been cancelled; the waitlist tickets will be sold at the standard conference rate. Sprints The Sprints are free for anyone to join. If you weren’t able to purchase a ticket but would love to spend some time with your fellow Djangonauts, the sprints are an excellent way of doing just that. If you plan on taking part in the sprints, please let us know via the sprint subscription page. If you’ve purchased tickets for the conference, you must still indicate that you’re staying for sprints by registering. Space at the sprint venue is limited, and we’d like to accomodate the maximum number of participants. Registering helps … -
Gunicorn on apache: zero length fix
I recently switched one of our django sites over from apache+mod_wsgi to apache(+mod_proxy)+gunicorn. The advantage of gunicorn is that every site runs in its own process instead of everything running within one apache. When a site barfs, you can at least see the culprit when you type "top". Oh, and the speed seemed higher. (For an introduction on gunicorn, see my summary of the gunicorn talk at last year's djangocon.eu). But today a colleague using IE8 couldn't load the PNG images. And in my log I'd get "connection reset by peer" errors out of gunicorn. I had no problems in firefox. Assumption: perhaps django's gzip middleware messes things up. I've seen gzip-related errors before. Never had a problem with it in django, but worth a try. So I disabled it. IE8 failed to work as before, but now also firefox didn't load the images. They came in as zero-length responses! The advantage: now I could debug it myself. I did a wget -S on the server itself to take a look at the headers as close to the site as possible. First a request to gunicorn running on port 10003 (some lines omitted as they're not relevant): Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:10003... … -
South migrations for geospatial field types
I wanted to create a south migration for one of my django apps. An app with geospatial field types. Oops: $> bin/django schemamigration lizard_opendap --initial ! Cannot freeze field 'lizard_opendap.point.geom' ! (this field has class django.contrib.gis.db.models.fields.PointField) ! Cannot freeze field 'lizard_opendap.line.geom' ! (this field has class django.contrib.gis.db.models.fields.LineStringField) ! South cannot introspect some fields; this is probably because they are custom ! fields. If they worked in 0.6 or below, this is because we have removed the ! models parser (it often broke things). ! To fix this, read http://south.aeracode.org/wiki/MyFieldsDontWork Weird. I googled a bit and found out that support for those geom fields was added some years ago. So it should work. The solution: I forgot to add 'django.contrib.gis' to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. I thought that entry wasn't needed anymore, so I tend to leave it out. (Iirc, it used to be necessary because of geospatial databases, but those databases work just fine without adding django.contrib.gis to INSTALLED_APPS now). Yep, now it works: $> bin/django schemamigration lizard_opendap --initial + Added model lizard_opendap.Setting + Added model lizard_opendap.SourceModel + Added model lizard_opendap.Scenario + Added model lizard_opendap.ModelResult + Added model lizard_opendap.Point + Added model lizard_opendap.PointValue + Added model lizard_opendap.Line + Added model lizard_opendap.LineValue … -
Chef scripting quick start
This post is about Chef. Chef is a big odd but very powerful piece of software. You'll probably find it extremely useful for your deploy tasks - as soon as you can understand it. -
New house
Big news for us: if everything goes right, we'll be moving in one or two months! I never expected it to go this fast. We wanted a slightly bigger house in order to give both our kids (boy + girl) a separate room. So mostly the same size, but with one extra room. And a slightly bigger garden to house our bikes wouldn't hurt. Two months ago we started looking at houses for rent. In the Netherlands every region has a system of doling out houses from the so-called "social housing rental corporations". Based on the amount of time you wait. You can sign in on three houses per two weeks and the longest waiting time wins. That's how we got our current house. Aforementioned housing system only is allowed up until a certain income. We're above that margin, so we had to look for the more expensive rental houses that are handled outside the social rent system. The advantage: they're available earlier. The disadvantage: they're more expensive. Three weeks ago we subscribed ourselves at two housing agencies for rental houses. And I booked an appointment at a mortgage agent just in case it was possible for us to buy … -
Migrating django(-cms) from sqlite to postgres
We've got a django-cms site that started out on sqlite. Now we're adding GIS shapefiles so we wanted to move to postgres/postgis. Ok, switch over the DATABASES definition in settings.py, make a fixture and load it, right? Ahem, no. There were a couple of problems, partially with our code, partially django-cms, partially django. Some solutions below might not be needed in every case, but I'm just going to list everything in the hope that it helps someone. South migration dependencies Lots of our code uses south for database migrations. But when creating our database from scratch, "migrate" would complain that a certain table of application A didn't exist yet when migrating application B. Uh oh, a dependency. Turns out that's easily solved. In the failing migration step, just add a dependency on the missing application's relevant step: ... class Migration(SchemaMigration): depends_on = ( ("application_a", "0001_initial"), ) def forwards(self, orm): ... After that, all migrations run fine. Small sqldiff limitation We've got django-extensions in our projects. One of the handy extra management commands it provides is "sqldiff" (so manage.py sqldiff or, as we use buildout, bin/django sqldiff). (The best extension is "graph_models" which creates a picture of your model structure). We … -
Open Source Repositories Have moved
We’ve moved our repositories yet again! First we hosted our repositories here on opensource.washingtontimes.com, then we moved them to http://github.com/washingtontimes. We’ve decided to move the projects (over 40 of them) to our Calloway project’s GitHub account. Please excuse the confusion. We feel this will keep them available for a long time. -
Classes are not just namespaces
There is a mistake that Python developers make every now and then. If they also happen to be authors of some framework, they can get away with telling us that this is the very framework's way and suggesting an ugly (yet "frameworky") workaround. But you can't, so please don't do this to us. A little rant on the "instance greed" and a reason of `View.as_view()` method in Django's class based views classes in the blog post. -
Django job at Net Communities
Net Communities are looking for a Python/Django developer to work on an in-house project. It's a contract that would require some on-site work, but they would also consider a full-time developer for the right individual. If you are interested, get in touch with Andy Evans. -
Django job at Net Communities
Net Communities are looking for a Python/Django developer to work on an in-house project. It's a contract that would require some on-site work, but they would also consider a full-time developer for the right individual. If you are interested, get in touch with Andy Evans. -
Django job at Net Communities
Net Communities are looking for a Python/Django developer to work on an in-house project. It's a contract that would require some on-site work, but they would also consider a full-time developer for the right individual. If you are interested, get in touch with Andy Evans. -
Creating a Read-only Mirror for your GitHub Server
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django-urli18n
Even I released django-urli18n already two weeks ago, I didn't find the time to actually announce it. So here it is: What is django-urli18n? A reusable Django app to display the current activated language in the URL. Features - different ways to show the language in the URL: in the path (for example www.example.com/en/home/) or in a query string (for example www.example.com/home/?lang=en) - simple to use and include into new or existing Django projects Where to get it? Check out the project page on Github. -
Django Canvas - Planned Feature List
Hi folks,I am really pleased that other developers have found Django Canvas useful and interesting. I had the idea of building this project at PyCon 2011, Atlanta, where I discussed it with other developers. Now that I have finally built it, I am happy that my efforts have been worth something. :)I have had a lot of great advice from many different sources, especially after superchink submitted the project on Hacker News. Useful channels for feedback have been: email, twitter, hacker news, reddit and convore.Despite the Google Code Jam taking up some time today, I have put together a list of features I'm planning for the next release.Feature listAPI for creating, downloading packages + user authenticationSSL (in case sensitive information is used within the configurations)Ability to add packages from djangopackages.com and git/mercurial/svn repositoriesPackage links and descriptions need to be accessible on the home pageUsers will be able to have accounts, save their settings and have their private base projects savedPublic base projects might be a useful addition to the communityAbility for django package owners to make their packages compatible with Django CanvasFabric supportCustomization of project structureLoading modal box to prevent user from downloading multiple archives at the same time.It would … -
Voxy.com Launch!
Voxy helps you learn a language from life. That means, doing things you would do anyway but learn a language while you do it. Like reading about the NFL lock-out in Spanish. If you're learning English, an English version is also available here. The iPhone app has reached #1 in the AppStore for education apps in 14 countries. Android app is coming any day now too. Both apps support location based learning. Are you near a bank and need to figure how to linguically maneuver through a transaction? Voxy can help! One of the fun things about building this site in Django is how well Django handles changes in company direction and the associated functionality. The app has iterated, very quickly, through many different versions and Django has handled everything in stride. The site and associated mobile APIs were created in Django 1.2 using PostgreSQL 9 along with the usual suspects of South, Sentry, django_extensions, debug toolbar, boto, celery with RabbitMQ and also dbgettext, photologue, django-rosetta and newcache. APIs we use are from SimpleGEO, Twilio (SMS), WordNIK, Recurly. And everything is deployed on Linode except for a server to translate audio using Natural Reader 10 running on Windows @ Amazon … -
Voxy Launch!
Voxy helps you learn a language from life. That means, doing things you would do anyway but learn a language while you do it. Like reading about the NFL lock-out in Spanish. If you're learning English, an English version is also available here. The iPhone app has reached #1 in the AppStore for education apps in 14 countries. Android app is coming any day now too. Both apps support location based learning. Are you near a bank and need to figure how to linguically maneuver through a transaction? Voxy can help! One of the fun things about building this site in Django is how well Django handles changes in company direction and the associated functionality. The app has iterated, very quickly, through many different versions and Django has handled everything in stride. The site and associated mobile APIs were created in Django 1.2 using PostgreSQL 9 along with the usual suspects of South, Sentry, django_extensions, debug toolbar, boto, celery with RabbitMQ and also dbgettext, photologue, django-rosetta and newcache. APIs we use are from SimpleGEO, Twilio (SMS), WordNIK, Recurly. And everything is deployed on Linode except for a server to translate audio using Natural Reader 10 running on Windows @ Amazon … -
Using virtual machine (vagrant) for you web development
In my opinion, environments on the development machine and production machine must be as close to each other as possible. But installing Postgres, Solr and whatnot on your local machine is a terrible option, and they quickly become unmanageable. We have a solution for that! -
Minor updates and API changes
Maybe you noticed that we've started to work on our projects again. ;) We unsurprisingly (:P) passed our final physics exams and are ready to work on NoSQL development again. Waldemar has already started to do some work in order to get our efforts into Django trunk. In the meantime I've started to work on some bug reports concerning django-dbindexer and nonrel-search. Both now have a dependency on django-autoload which ensures the loading of indexes or signal handlers before any request is processed. As a consequence, you have to adapt your code if you make use of django-dbindexer or nonrel-search. The documentation has been changed in order to reflect these changes. Maybe we'll take a few days off to go on vacation. Then, we'll come back and continue improving the way of NoSQL development. Leave a comment -
How to search with row level permissions?
Searching on a site where everyone has access to only some content can be tricky to implement. I'm discussing here several basic concepts about row level permissions and how to implement full-text search without hacking and complicated code. -
Haystack 1.2 Released
Haystack 1.2 Released
