Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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CoolThePlanet silent launch, improvements and usability
It's been silent on the Melt blog, partly because I was unable to work for a few days, partly because we did a silent launch of www.cooltheplanet.net, and invited first people to test it out. In the meantime, we also worked on Speakup Middle East, our sister incarnation of the "Custard Melt" software. And we did a first round of improvements and fixes based on user feedback. We have a special group for that, by the way. -
Using CrackLib to require stronger passwords
Let’s face it, humans are not well adapted to memorizing strings of random characters; and hence, the average computer user is not very good at creating secure passwords. Most users create passwords made up of easy-to-remember words, like the name of a favorite sports team or maybe the name of a significant other. In this [...] -
ChangeManipulators on only part of a model
Django has some cool forms management functionality that takes the hard work out of displaying forms and managing the users input. Unfortunately, the ChangeManipulator expects that all fields in a model will be updated by the ChangeManipulator, and cries about any required/not-null fields that you don't display to the user in the form. This is a huge issue when you want to display a form to a user that only modifies a very small part of a model. For example, you have a 'product' model with a few boolean fields, and you want the user to only alter the 'description' field with a ChangeManipulator. If you were to use the standard ChangeManipulator code (from the above URL) and only displayed the field 'description' to your user, the resulting code would either wipe the values of the boolean fields, or if they're required, complain that they don't have a value. The fix is simple, and it's been in Django since the new-admin branch late last year. Why it isn't documented, I don't know. It's somewhat explained in Django Ticket # 420. When you call your ChangeManipulator, there is a second parameter you can use to define which fields will and won't … -
ChangeManipulators on only part of a model
Django has some cool forms management functionality that takes the hard work out of displaying forms and managing the users input. Unfortunately, the ChangeManipulator expects that all fields in a model will be updated by the ChangeManipulator, and cries about any required/not-null fields that you don't display to the … -
Pronouncement
So it seems the BDFL Pronounced that Django is the Python web framework. Obviously this makes me pretty damn happy. I’m sure this will help people trying to choose a web framework come to Django, and I think they’ll like what they find. Personally, I think Django’s the best tool to develop web sites – but of course I think that. However, I want to make sure everyone has read Kevin Dangoor’s thoughts on the announcement. -
Extend Django’s database API to include full-text search
Here we will introduce Django's database API, and demonstrate its flexibility by extending it to support MySQL's full-text search capabilities. -
Go-live date, second deployment and other stuff
Well it's been a longer than expected road but we're nearly there. Our staging instance is running something that is 99.9% of a production branch. We would have gone live on Friday but staffing shortages mean it's going to be Tuesday now... In other news we're working on a second instance of the platform, this one to support work Greenpeace will be doing in the middle east in the wake of the Lebanon crisis. You can read more about that project at it's holding site at www.speakup-middleeast.org . Hopefully that site will be up and running by the end of this week. We've also been working hard to import our geo-data into the system. The GNS data we've been working with varies widely in quality. Some countries (eg Australia) can be pulled seamlessly out of the database, others (eg. Israel) suffer from duplicate or missing administration districts which has necessitated some manual fixes. The GNS data provides about ten times more data than the initial Geo-Rosetta data we deployed, so it's worth the hassle to get it in there. Still, nearly there... -
Go-live date, second deployment and other stuff
Well it's been a longer than expected road but we're nearly there. Our staging instance is running something that is 99.9% of a production branch. We would have gone live on Friday but staffing shortages mean it's going to be Tuesday now... In other news we're working on a second instance of the platform, this one to support work Greenpeace will be doing in the middle east in the wake of the Lebanon crisis. You can read more about that project at it's holding site at www.speakup-middleeast.org . Hopefully that site will be up and running by the end of this week. We've also been working hard to import our geo-data into the system. The GNS data we've been working with varies widely in quality. Some countries (eg Australia) can be pulled seamlessly out of the database, others (eg. Israel) suffer from duplicate or missing administration districts which has necessitated some manual fixes. The GNS data provides about ten times more data than the initial Geo-Rosetta data we deployed, so it's worth the hassle to get it in there. Still, nearly there... -
Stockphoto 0.2 released
I got impatient and decided to go ahead and release version 0.2 of stockphoto . This version introduces no new ... -
Stockphoto 0.2 released
I got impatient and decided to go ahead and release version 0.2 of stockphoto . This version introduces no new ... -
Any Django People Coming To LinuxWorld?
Anyone working on/with or just interested in Django coming to LinuxWorld? If so, let me know and we'll see about an informal meetup. -
A new litmus test for evaluating Python web frameworks — What’s your security policy?
With the almost daily announcement of new Python-based web frameworks, there needs to be a way to filter the contenders from the pretenders. I’ve been mulling over the idea of compiling a checklist for evaluating new frameworks. The checklist could also be used by new would-be Python framework creators as a gut check for the [...] -
Django is the favourite of Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum said in the latest FLOSS Weekly podcast: My personal favorite -- and I expect that that will remain a personal favorite for a long time -- is something named Django. ... I highly recommend it. Django has been my tool for a new project of mine, has been worth it the time spent learning Django and Python(right now my personal favourite programming language). Django preferred setup is Apache with mod_python, this has make my choice easier because I've been always using Apache with PHP. If you want to give it a try(I recommend it), read the Part 1 of the tutorial. And if you have doubts about performance, read this. -
Django is the favourite of Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum said in the latest FLOSS Weekly podcast: My personal favorite -- and I expect that that will remain a personal favorite for a long time -- is something named Django. ... I highly recommend it. Django has been my tool for a new project of mine, has been worth it the time spent learning Django and Python(right now my personal favourite programming language). Django preferred setup is Apache with mod_python, this has make my choice easier because I've been always using Apache with PHP. If you want to give it a try(I recommend it), read the Part 1 of the tutorial. And if you have doubts about performance, read this. -
Second skinning
Yes, this week we are moving! Second-skinning the Melt site, and you can see it happen. After quite a few discussions and deliberations about name, logo, colours, what not, we're now at my preferred stage: doing it. Right now, I am at the office of Eight Media in Arnhem, where Simon is working live at the Melt staging site to implement the design. You will notice the name under which this all will go live: CoolThePlanet.net. Lots of little design decisions and checking it out with BrowserCam on different platforms, while hacking away at the Django templates, hopefully taking the opportunity to internationalise the static interface texts in there, and be ready for localisation in other languages. But first, counting down the days now to the opening of CoolThePlanet.net! -
Second skinning
Yes, this week we are moving! Second-skinning the Melt site, and you can see it happen. After quite a few discussions and deliberations about name, logo, colours, what not, we're now at my preferred stage: doing it. Right now, I am at the office of Eight Media in Arnhem, where Simon is working live at the Melt staging site to implement the design. You will notice the name under which this all will go live: CoolThePlanet.net. Lots of little design decisions and checking it out with BrowserCam on different platforms, while hacking away at the Django templates, hopefully taking the opportunity to internationalise the static interface texts in there, and be ready for localisation in other languages. But first, counting down the days now to the opening of CoolThePlanet.net! -
Estimating unknown
How long does it take to do a project? Software developers are asked this very question on regular basis. This is how every project begins. Why is it important? Because “time is money” and many software projects are priced mostly by time spent on the project. “We will take your project estimate in hours, multiply them by your rate in $/h, and we have our price.” Ask any consultant or IT staffer about that. Let’s look at estimates in the Real World(tm). -
Django .95 Is Here!
Yes, Django .95 has just been released. For those who don't run off SVN trunk, there will be some upgrade issues. Read Removing The Magic on the Django wiki carefully. The changes to Django are well worth any upgrade inconvenience. And some things are just plain easier to get done post magic removal, as I found out this week back-porting a Google site map generator app I wrote while running from SVN.Congratulations to Adrian, Jacob, and all who contribute code for the release! -
Post-OSCONum part 1: try not to suck
Post-OSCONum part 1: try not to suck Good lord, I’m exhausted. OSCON was amazing. It’s clear that a sea change is occurring in the open source movement: to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly’s keynote, we’re finally moving away from “free software is better because it’s free” towards “free software is better because it’s better". This of course makes being a free software author more exciting than ever. Judging by the number of job postings, it’s also easier than ever to actually get paid for work on open source. -
Acknowledging the Mobile Web with Django
I was reading up on HowToProvideAlternateViewsForMobileDevices on the Rails wiki this morning and couldn’t help but notice how much easier it is to set up a mobile version of a Django site. At World Online we have stripped-down barebones no frills “all we want are the facts ma’am” versions of all of our sites. They prove extremely useful during KU basketball games or when you’re in downtown lawrence and want to know what restaurants are open. Since our mobile sites are just alternate templates on the same views, setup goes something like this: In main_site.settings: TEMPLATE_DIRS = ( '/path/to/templates/mainsite.com/', '/path/to/templates/default/', ) In mobile_site.settings: from main_site.settings import * TEMPLATE_DIRS = ( '/path/to/templates/mobile.mainsite.com/', '/path/to/templates/default/' ) The first line imports all of the settings from your main site. We then overwrite the TEMPLATE_DIRS setting to point to the mobile version of our templates (and fall back to default templates if there isn’t a mobile specific version). Because every app that we write also gets a default template we can have a complete mobile site up and running by creating just one or two mobile base templates. While Django can’t help you debate internally the “one web” versus “two webs” philosophies, it can definitely … -
Getting up to speed for developers
As we're moving along, I'm starting to collect stuff that can help people get started with Django. An interesting list of links on the blixtra blog: Top 30 Django Tutorials and Articles, complementing the overview of documentation on the Django site. In the meantime, our colleagues at hosting have provided us a virtual machine to configure as the host for our platform. We are thinking about making such a virtual machine available to developers as well. It would make live so much easier: download the image, run it, and you're ready to help in developing our platform. No other downloads or setups needed, eveything including the automated testing ready for you to use. Also, the data sets for our geo-location data are being merged. We have some 108,000 places in there, and about to add another 150,000 or so for the US, with a third collection still waiting. Getting everything together (longitude, lattitude, duplicate names, missing links to country or region, different spellings or transcriptions, there is some work involved before we get things on a map). Another interesting week ahead. -
Getting up to speed for developers
As we're moving along, I'm starting to collect stuff that can help people get started with Django. An interesting list of links on the blixtra blog: Top 30 Django Tutorials and Articles, complementing the overview of documentation on the Django site. In the meantime, our colleagues at hosting have provided us a virtual machine to configure as the host for our platform. We are thinking about making such a virtual machine available to developers as well. It would make live so much easier: download the image, run it, and you're ready to help in developing our platform. No other downloads or setups needed, eveything including the automated testing ready for you to use. Also, the data sets for our geo-location data are being merged. We have some 108,000 places in there, and about to add another 150,000 or so for the US, with a third collection still waiting. Getting everything together (longitude, lattitude, duplicate names, missing links to country or region, different spellings or transcriptions, there is some work involved before we get things on a map). Another interesting week ahead. -
"Show-stoppers"
Lately a large number of questions posted to django-users have included phrases like “this is a show-stopper” or “this is critical”. I think it’s worth my time to point out that this is a lousy method of getting developers to do what you want. It’s the online equivalent of threatening to take your ball and go home, and is about as effective. I understand the impulse perfectly: there’s the fear that we won’t take you seriously if you don’t tell us just how important this is. -
Digg dugg
My last entry about my dog eating my DSlite hit Digg (screenshot), Reddit (screenshot), and a couple of other big-traffic sites over the weekend. Pretty cool, but the coolest part is that my server — a single commodity Linux box that cost less than $3,000, running about 15 other sites — didn’t even hiccup. Reason #4453 to use Django? It’s fast. Crazy fast. Oh, and to all the Diggers who suggested that I should kill my dog? -
Back online and moving ahead
Last Friday we had a problem with our development server, and so our Melt instances were unavailable for a while. Yesterday, a disk change in that server caused some more downtime, but things are back up again. In the meantime, it has been a bit quiet here on the blog, while work was progressing. The naming and design are moving forward, and we should have final versions and be implementing the design in our templates soon. And... we now have the Melt project space at Sourceforge (thanks for your help, Misha!), so our software will become available through the new Sourceforge Subversion system.
