Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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Changing language on the admin
When working on multilanguage sites, a feature that many times I missed is a direct way to change the language when you're on the admin,With standard Django the only way that exists (as far as I know), is leaving the admin, going to the website, change the language there, and come back to the admin. Not very fast.Today, I've created a snippet that creates a drop down menu on the admin bar (just in the main page) to change the language.Hope it helps. -
DjangoCon is still alive?
On July 13th, DjangoCon 2008 was announced, and the illusion and nervousness started for many djangonauts. The main problem here, is that due to the lack of time and experience, the number of attendees is limited to 200. That makes sense, but there are other things that doesn't make sense to me. This post is about that, and it's intended to be a kind of constructive criticism.The fact is that many people is waiting to know if he/she can get a ticket to start planning the trip to SF, ans specially to purchase flight tickets. In those two weeks since DjangoCon announcement, flight prices from Barcelona to SF have increased in a 30%. I don't think it's the only case.My question is... It is so difficult to develop and run an application to register users, letting many djangonauts to save some money that could be given to the DSF? :) Are you coding it in PHP? ;)Seriously, if you need help, just ask for it, we are a community. But please, stop delaying ticket releasing, we have to get our tickets, make our plans, and we don't want to waste our money getting last time flight tickets. IMHO ticket realising … -
TransDb working on trunk!
Some days ago, after the merge of qs-rf to trunk, model field i18n was in trouble, so the principal package for this approach (django-multilingual) stopped working for the latest version of trunk.This weekend we had a TransDb sprint, to try to improve our project, and contribute to fix this situation in any way.The result: We fixed many issues on TransDb, now the project has a more conventional structure, and a setup script, and... TransDb is now working on trunk!For achieving it we created a new branch called oldforms.Try it now! -
Searching on Django Snippets
One of the key websites about Django is Django Snippets, by one of the key Django developers, James Bennett.I've followed many of the James work, and it's awesome; but I've a complaint on Django Snippets. It's the inefficient way to find anything there. The only ways that I've found is searching using a paginated list by author, language or tag (sorted alphabetically), where you can spend a huge amount of time if the tag you search starts by Z.Of course that I can go to Google an search using site:www.djangosnippets.org, and it would work for all indexed snippets, but I think that at least this search box should be added on the site (until anybody writes the generic search engine for Django). It would also help adding result page numbers (with links) at the end of the paginated list. -
TransDb: Django’s i18n for database
Today I've created my own code for having (in Django) fields in more than one language stored in database. There were some other packages, but none of them useful for me (as commented here).TransDb's main goal is that is simple, for application users, application programmers, and the code itself. Some work is still missing, but there is a working version at TransDb Google Code page.Any comment will be appreciate. -
Media data without media directory
It's not a big trouble, but I wanted to remove the /media/ prefix on all my media links, like...<img alt="My Image" src="/media/img/myimage.png"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="/media/css/mysheet.css" type="text/css"/>and so on.This can be easily achieved by replacing in apache's configuration file:<Location "/media/">SetHandler None</LocationMatch>by<LocationMatch "/((css|js|img|swf|pdf)/|favicon.ico)">SetHandler None</LocationMatch>Of course you have to have all you media files in folders like css, js, img... or anything that you specify in last regular expression.UPDATE: See this post before using this approach. -
Normalize name and size images in Django (and adding thumbnails)
I wanted to assign an image to every element in a model. I wanted them to have a thumbnail, and to have normalized sizes and names. And of course, I want my application to do everything automatically.The best method I've found is next, modifying models.py (note that PIL must be installed):def rename_image(src, field, id): file_ext = os.path.splitext(src)[1].lower().replace('jpg', 'jpeg') dst = 'img/uploaded/work_%s/%s_%s%s' % (field, field, id, file_ext) return dstdef resize_image(src, dst, size): from PIL import Image image = Image.open(src) image.thumbnail(size, Image.ANTIALIAS) image.save('%s%s' % (settings.MEDIA_ROOT, dst)) return dstclass MyModel(models.Model): image = models.ImageField(upload_to='img/uploaded/work_image', verbose_name=_('imagen')) thumbnail = models.ImageField(editable=False, upload_to='img/uploaded/work_thumbnail') [...] def save(self): super(MyModel, self).save() if self.image != rename_image(self.image, 'image', self.id): original_filename = self.get_image_filename() self.thumbnail = resize_image(original_filename, rename_image(original_filename, 'thumbnail', self.id), [100, 75]) self.image = resize_image(original_filename, rename_image(original_filename, 'image', self.id), [640, 480]) if os.path.exists(original_filename): os.remove(original_filename) super(MyModel, self).save() -
TransDb: Pretty much easier
Today I've released a new version of TransDb, the Django package that allows storing text at database in more than one language (using the same field).New version is pretty much easier to use, after fixing many bugs, and avoiding the use of a filter in templates.Now, migrating your single-language application to a multi-language one is very easy, so almost the only thing you've to do is changing your model fields (no data transformation is required, it is done automatically when you translate texts at admin). A full migration procedure is available at project page.You can find everything at Google's project page. -
Django L10n
This Sunday, I participated in This Week in Django, and tried to give some ideas on Django localization.Here I'll post some of the ideas of the interview (and some that I missed), for serving as reference:How to translate your application (quick guide): Mark every text in your application for translation: In models.py, views.py... convert 'my text in just one language' to _('my text to translate'). Don't forget to import _: from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _ In templates, convert <p>Text in english</p> to <p>{% trans 'Text in many languages' %}</p> (also this can be done with blocktrans tag) Go to your project path and create a directory called locale (also you can do that just for an application) Execute ${PATH_TO_DJANGO}/bin/make-messages -l ${LANGUAGE_CODE} (where language code is en for english, es for spanish...) Edit ${PROJECT_PATH}/locale/${LANGUAGE_CODE}/LC_MESSAGES/django.po and set the msgstr variables with the translation of every msgid Run msgfmt django.po -o django.mo (I just realized after the interview that exists a django script complie-messages.py that does that for all .po files) And then you have your application translated. There are some settings in settings.py that need to be set for making it work (USE_I18N = True, set LANGUAGES and LANGUAGE_CODE, and specify … -
Django Catalan usergroup meeting
Six months ago, I decided to create the Django Catalan usergroup, for user in Catalonia, and for users who speak catalan.Today I'm happy to announce that we are already 26 members, and we are going to have our first meeting on April 3rd. We've decided to meet together with people from The Barcelona Python Meetup Group, so both groups have common interests, and many people in common.Our planning is having some talks on key subjects such as "Django presentation to non-Django users", "Django status", "Django i18n", "Python 3k"... as well as lightning talks from everybody, to share personal or professional experience with Python/Django. We'll also discuss about organizing a conference in Barcelona, and about the Django-Rails football (aka soccer) match.If you are in Barcelona on 3rd, and you want to join us, here you have details (remember that attendance confirmation is required one day before the event):http://python.meetup.com/185/calendar/7640211/See you there! -
New DSNP version
DSNP is a simple and customizable Python script, that automatically creates a working Django project.Project (and application) creation in Django are very openend and flexible, but sometimes is useful getting all the work done for you, specially: If you create many Django projects with the same structure. If you're new to Python, and want to see a "hello world!" application working in less than one minute. If you want to check your Django structure with somebody's else (me).DSNP does exactly that, automates the process of creating projects and applications in Django. The resulting website is a simple project with a single application, ready for start creating models and templates. It's also customizable, to let everyone set their own preferences in the script, and adapt it to your desired structure.Want to try it (in five simple steps)?svn checkout http://dsnp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/python dsnp.py myprojectcd myprojectpython manage.py runserverBrowse http://localhost:8000/ Easy right? -
More django!
Ahh, finally... me and my co-worker convinced our boss to ditch our's lab www site based on Liferay. Among other problems, the big one was that there were three big unmaintanable catalogs each with separate Liferay instance.I don't want to criticize Liferay yet it's too big for our needs. It also does not fit in well into me and my co-worker skillsets (well it fit is a bit worse after I converted him from Java to Python ;).So we're looking for something that is: * possibly written in Python (easily extendable for us) * possibly Django compatibile (we have one service based on django and it would be nice if it could be easily put together, there'll be more django-based services in the future) I'm going to hunt something down on Monday. -
Django Site of the Week - Represent
Represent is a new website prototype from the New York Times that provides New York residents with information about the whereabouts of their elected representatives. What's interesting about this website is that it's one of the first large-scale sites to implement GeoDjango for spatially-aware applications. This week, I spoke with … -
Django Site of the Week - Represent
Represent is a new website prototype from the New York Times that provides New York residents with information about the whereabouts of their elected representatives. What's interesting about this website is that it's one of the first large-scale sites to implement GeoDjango for spatially-aware applications. This week, I spoke with Derek Willis to get some details on their implementation of a Django project at one of the worlds' most famous newspapers. You can read the entire interview over at the Django site of the Week website. -
Django Model Class Style Guide
Any constants and/or lists of choices The full list of fields The Meta class, if present The __unicode__() method The save() method, if it’s being overridden The get_absolute_url() method, if present Any additional custom methods Sources Practical Django Projects p. 62 (pre-1.0 old admin stuff omitted) Django Documentation -
Slicing A List Into Equal Groups in Python
There are several ways to do this, but I found out today that it’s possible to use itertools’ izip method to achieve the same effect as well, so I thought I would note it down here to reference later. Basically, we want to take a list and group it into sublists that don’t go over a specific length. I am using this to partition lists into rows, to be used as a Django template tag. Here is how it works with izip: >> from itertools import izip >> l = range(10) >> [s for s in izip(*[iter(l)] * n)] + [l[len(l) - (len(l) % n):]][[0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 8], [9]] izip ignores the rest of the list if it doesn’t break cleanly, that’s why there has to be an additional part there to add the remainder of the items. Apparently a new method called izip_longest was introduced in 2.6 that takes extra items into account as well. It is also worth noting that some excellent partitioning filters can be found at Django snippets, this is mainly for fun! -
Using a metaclass for registering template tags
Writing your template tags requires too much boilerplate code. Period. I think we all agree on that. Let's see how we can improve it. A lot of times I find myself writing code like this (error handling omitted for clarity): @register.tag def my_menu(parser, token): tag_name, argument1, argument2 = token.split_contents() return MyMenuNode(argument1, argument2) class MyMenuNode(template.Node): def __init__(self, argument1, argument2): ... We are specifying the argument count and the template tag name twice, not exactly DRY friendly ;). After evaluating the solutions coming to my mind, I decided to go with a metaclass based approach, keeping the magic to a minimum. import inspect from django import template register = template.Library() class NodeType(type): def __init__(mcs, name, bases, dct): super(NodeType, mcs).__init__(name, bases, dct) if not mcs.is_node(name, dct): tag_name = ''.join(char if char.islower() else '_%s' % char.lower() for char in name)[1:-5] init = mcs.get_init(bases, dct) (args, varargs, varkw, defaults) = inspect.getargspec(init) arg_count = len(args) # not exactly arg count, but this way we avoid adding one in tag_function def tag_function(parser, token): arguments = token.split_contents() if len(arguments) != arg_count: raise template.TemplateSyntaxError('%s tag requires %d arguments' % (arguments[0], arg_count - 1)) return mcs(*arguments[1:]) register.tag(name=tag_name, compile_function=tag_function) def is_node(mcs, name, dct): return name == 'Node' and dct['__module__'] == __name__ … -
Keep your Django Applications in a Subfolder
To keep your Django applications neatly filed into a subfolder (such as apps/), first add the following to your settings.py: import os PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.dirname(__file__) Then in manage.py: Right under #!/usr/bin/env python add: import sys from os.path import abspath, dirname, join from site import addsitedir Right before if __name__ == "__main__": add: sys.path.insert(0, join(settings.PROJECT_ROOT, "apps")) [...] -
What is django.contrib?
Since it comes up a lot, I thought I’d spend a bit of time writing up my thoughts on what django.contrib really is, and what including a package in it really means. The following is just my personal opinion – really; that’s why this is posted here instead of over in the official Django documentation. However, most of the core team discussed this topic at length at DjangoCon, so I’m fairly sure there’s consensus over the rough outline. -
minibooks: Small Business Bookkeeping
Caktus released minibooks (open-sourced under the AGPL) as a bookkeeping package for small tech agencies. Boasting a double-entry accounting system, customer relationship management (CRM) and transaction reconciliation, minibooks provides a clean, multiuser web-based interface to manage simple accounting needs for small businesses. -
Using Django templates with jQuery AJAX
I recently discovered a neat way of displaying data retrieved using jQuery AJAX in concert with Django’s template engine. You can create a view in Django which simply uses the render_to_response shortcut function to render the results server-side and then just use jquery.load to dynamically fetch the results. Eventhough, returning some raw JSON data is […] -
Как работает SM.Org
Недавно расквитался в первом приближении с давно висящей и давящую на голову задачкой: опубликовал исходный код всех Джанго-приложений, которые поддерживают разные части SoftwareManiacs.Org. И меня посетила мысль поделиться тем, как оно вообще у меня тут все живет. Сайт SoftwareManiacs.Org работает на VPS-сервере (у компании TekTonic) и представляет собой сборную солянку ... -
Software Design Paralysis
Friends, I have come to an impasse. I have an awesome concept for embedding images into these blog posts. The idea is this: Use an Attachment model with a generic foreign key to allow images to be attached to blog posts Use a markdown extension to allow attached files to be referenced inside the blog post's body Here's the syntax I wanted to support in markdown: This isn't that impossible a task, and in fact, I have done it, but there are some wrinkles. The main issue is that I really want to limit my markdown extension's file lookup to only those files actually attached to the blog post. The second issue is that I would like to be able to specify a template to use for rendering each attachment, and I'd like to be able to specify different templates in different contexts. Both problems revolve around how I should do the actual conversion from markdown syntax to HTML. I implemented my solution as a markdown extension because I wanted to continue to use the markdown template filter. I'm already using it with the pygments extension I discussed earlier: {{ blogpost.body|markdown:"pygments" }} I was imagining that I could implement my … -
Django Site of the Week - EveryBlock
The Django Site of the Week is back after a Christmas-induced break with an interview with Adrian Holovaty. Adrian is no stranger to Django, and his name is known throughout the community as one of the brains behind Django's birth and subsequent open-source release. His latest project EveryBlock is the evolution of an earlier mashup, chicagocrime.org, which won Adrian a number of awards. So what are the driving forces behind EveryBlock? I recently spoke with Adrian to find out. You can read the interview now over at Django Site of the Week. -
Django Site of the Week - EveryBlock
The Django Site of the Week is back after a Christmas-induced break with an interview with Adrian Holovaty. Adrian is no stranger to Django, and his name is known throughout the community as one of the brains behind Django's birth and subsequent open-source release. His latest project EveryBlock is the …
