Webmonkey has some terrific coverage of DjangoCon, including this piece on the Django and journalism panel. What I took away from it is that Matt Croydon still wears his kakis with a cuff and a crease. Visit site »
Very nice cheat sheet for Django 1.0 from MercuryTide. Well-done. Visit site »
Now this is interesting: a web “framework” written in Python, released today. Apparently you can use it to develop web sites more quickly and efficiently. I hear it even makes programming “fun.” It’s great to see new projects still coming out on this front.
Oh, what’s that you say? Django’s been available for three years and used in production on major news sites even longer than that? Weird. You would think it would be at 5.0, by now. :)
Seriously — congrats to everyone involved. I’ve been keeping up with the latest revisions, and I know this: the Django I fell in love with a coupe years ago is a total piece of shit compared to 1.0. Visit site »
Uses the Google search API to add a simple site search to your Django project. Looks interesting. Might consider adding this to Savoy as a lightweight alternative to the more heavy-handed djangosearch. Visit site »
Comprehensive guide to porting Django .96 apps to Django 1.0. Short version? You’re going to be doing a lot of boring, tedious work. Have fun. Visit site »
Great example of how badass the Django signals framework is. Basically, it lets you inject code upon some event happening, such as an object being saved, deleted, or in this case, a comment being posted. I use signals throughout Savoy, such as to geolocate an object as its saved, and to add a tumblelog object when particular types of content are saved. It’s good stuff. This example also uses Django’s brand-spanking new comments framework. Visit site »
Wonderful radio station site from the talented team at GCap. Really nice from the bottom up — Django-based CMS, nice design, good content. I dig it. Congrats to Simon Willison, Robert Lofthouse, and whoever else was involved in this one. Visit site »
Frank Wiles has a nice piece on Django in the latest issue of Linux Magazine. He talks to Django lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss and covers all the basics. Both Frank and Jacob worked for the Lawrence Journal-World back when I did and have since moved on. In fact, Frank led the team that built a very cool Perl web framework called Gantry (http://www.usegantry.org/). It’s a little known bit of trivia that the Lawrence Journal-World actually is home to not one, but TWO open source web frameworks. Not bad for a small-town newspaper in Kansas, huh?
Not god enough for you? How about this: Linux Magazine is also based in Lawrence. :) Visit site »
Django 1.0’s release party will be at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday, September 6th at 7pm. I totally wish I could be there. Don’t feel sorry for me, though — I’ll be trying to find some hot karaoke action in London at the time. :) Visit site »
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;) Visit site »
Since the first day I started working with Django in January of 2006, Jacob told me that the comments app would be rewritten before Django 1.0. It’s become something of a joke to me. Whenever someone says a feature is coming in a future version of Django, I throw out the classic, “oh yeah, along with the comments app refactor, right?”
Well today, that vaporware solidified into something real. The new version is documented, combines the old Comment and FreeComment models, and makes use of all the modern Django APIs that didn't exist when the first version was written. It looks quite nice.
I’m really curious to see just how many people who already have comments on their Django site go to the trouble of switching to the new app. I know I probably won’t. The trouble is, the old app was so — well, old — that almost everyone has written their own, or adopted something like Eric’s django-threaddedcomments. While it looks like it’s pretty easy to upgrade from the old comments app, I’m not sure anyone is really using the old comments app — and switching from custom apps, like the one I’ve written, wouldn’t be nearly as easy.
I think I’ll use the new django.contrib.comments going forward for sites that it feels appropriate for, and I'll probably steal a few ideas from it for my own comments app -- but migrating jeffcroft.com to it just seems like more trouble than it's worth.
That’s definitely not a dig on the new system though — like I said, it looks very nice. Kudos go to Thejaswi Puthraya, who did most of the works on the new system as part of Google’s Summer of Code, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, who I know has had this thing on his radar for a very, very long time. Visit site »
The Django documentation has been entirely refactored. It’s much more readable online, now. I like. Visit site »
Adam Gomaa explains the Python property built-in and some clever ways to use it with Django. I particularly like the caching-of-URLs suggestion at the end of the article. Visit site »
I finally got the balls to put some of my code out there. This simple app allows for “e-mail this to a friend” functionality for any instance of any model in your Django database. If it sounds interesting, check it out. I’d love feedback. As you know, I’m a designer first, coder second, so I’m quite sure some of my code is not as optimal as it could be. Hopefully someone will find it useful. Visit site »
A pluggable app for working with timezones in Django. Looks very useful. Brian Rosner and James Tauber are definitely leading the pluggable app charge — both are putting out a lot of useful stuff. Thanks, guys. Via Simon. Visit site »
EveryBlock added Seattle to its list of cities — as well as Boston and D.C. Sweet. Visit site »
Via Jacob, here’s a clever method for using Markdown to insert images into the content of a blog post, article, or whathaveyou. As Jacob notes, it’s similar to the concept of “inlines,” pioneered in Ellington, and later implemented in Nathan’s Basic Apps and my Savoy. It’s not as flexible as inlines (with inlines, you can insert any object, not just images, and you can access all attributes of your object, not just the file URL), but it’s a lot simpler, too. If you just need to plop images into a chunk of text, this will work great. Visit site »
The Chicago Tribune has a lengthy profile of EveryBlock founder and Django co-creator Adrian Holotvay. Despite the super-lame title, the piece is actually really good, and, at least from my interactions with him, captures Adrian’s personality quite nicely. Adrian does seem to have that “everything I touch turns to gold” thing going for him — he’s definitely deserving of a nice profile in his hometown paper. Visit site »
A nice piece on Webmonkey about how to build a basic tumblelog with Django. The technique used is similar in concept (but a bit simpler) than what I’ve done here at jeffcroft.com. Note, though, that the Django signals bit in the article refers to the syntax for signals before a recent API change, so you’ll need minor changes to the code in the article to make it work with the current version of Django. Visit site »
I’ll be damned if it doesn’t seem like this whole Django 1.0 thing might actually happen. Be sure to read the release notes — there are several backwards incompatible changes (which are annoying, but it’s way better to get them out of the way before 1.0 than after it). Visit site »