Django roundup: October 7

Posted by Clint Ecker on Oct. 7, 2007

After a short hiatus, the Django Roundups are back! Lets not waste any time and dive in:

• Django news:
  • The Django Sprint that took place last month looks as if it went off without a hitch. Adrian Holovaty documented on the Google Code Blog the tremendous level of activity that took place over the course of a single weekend: “The sprint was intensely productive, with more than 400 tickets closed in the Django issue-tracking system, 300 new patches/ticket attachments and more than 200 commits to the Django code base. All told, there were more than 2,440 changes, including wiki changes, ticket changes, patch uploads and code check-ins.”
  • Simon Willison has published another set of slides in his Advanced Django series. This version is nearly identical to the previous with a new section on newforms.
  • Siddhi Govindaraj has created a second Django tutorial in screencast format. Siddhi’s second video expands on the wiki application from his first video by adding wikkiwords and search capabilities.
• Projects of note:
  • Django Gigs has launched and serves as a single place to find work as a Django developer, and for employers to find highly-qualified programmers who are proficient with Django.
  • James Bennett has updated his excellent django-registration application to version 0.3. This update adds a more customizable email subject line, configurable form classes, configurable templates, a maintenance script to clean out expired user accounts, expanded documentation, unicode updates, and locale support.
  • Django on Jython work has continued over the past month or so with additional strides made toward total compatibility. Leonardo Soto Muñoz provides a roundup of advancements as of September 13, 2007. Frank Wierzbicki, lead developer of Jython, is also maintaining a document of the current gaps between Django and Jython.
  • What The Form is an extension for Django’s newforms that allows a developer to design how the form will be displayed to the user. Meta attributes like fieldsets and columns can be defined by the developer within their models and can be nested as much as necessary.
  • Björn Kempén has launched a Django-powered BitTorrent tracker he calls Geektorrent.
• Code snippets and tutorials:
  • Ryan Kanno has produced a templatetag that formats decimal values of a certain range into image-based ” star-style ratings. Ryan’s tag deals with rounding, and can be configured to handle star values down to 0.25 of a star.
  • James Bennett describes, in detail, several solid procedures for using your Django projects in standalone scripts and from the command line in general.
  • Pedro Vale Lima shows how you can use your Django project’s MEDIA_URL value in your JavaScript files.
  • James Bennett shows how you can set up Django to properly send email from your Joyent Connector.
  • Peter Nixon shows how to authenticate Django against FreeRADIUS
• New user groups and other miscellaneous news:
  • Several new non-English language Django user groups have sprung up over the past month:
    • Django Catalan
    • Django Russian
    • Django Greece
  • The team at Rails Envy produced an entertaining and good-natured video aimed at Django last month.

If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker+djangotips@gmail.com.

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