Django

On Friday, Sept. 14, 2007, we're going to hold a worldwide Django sprint -- an excuse for people to focus their undivided attention for a full day (or two) on improving Django. We've got a bunch of features that are almost done but haven't yet ... [More] been committed/merged -- including newforms-admin, ORM aggregate support, multi-DB support and GeoDjango. Plus, we've got almost 1,000 open tickets in our ticket system. We plan to devote at least 24 hours of focused work to get some of this done in an organized fashion, and also to encourage new people to contribute. If all goes well on Friday, we'll probably continue to Saturday. Anybody can participate and contribute, and there's no obligation or expectation. If you've never contributed to Django before, this is the perfect chance for you to chip in. More information is on the wiki page. Most participants will likely be working from their own homes/offices in their respective countries, but a few of us in the U.S.A. will be meeting in person for more effective communication and momentum. We have tentative plans to congregate at the Google offices in Chicago and the main Google headquarters in Mountain View, California -- but in order for those plans to be firmed up, we need to provide a realistic headcount to the Google folks. Hence, if you're available to sprint and want to join us in person from either Chicago or Mountain View, please let me know as soon as you can. All participants -- not just those meeting in person -- are encouraged to add their names to the wiki page. [Less]

Django sites and projects of note: Satchmo is a robust web shop application written purely on top of Django. The Satchmo project hit a major milestone in its development this past week with version 0.5 (tarball) hitting the virtual shelves. ... [More] Some highlights from the release notes: “100% template driven design using the django template system, integration with authorize.net, Paypal and google payment processing systems, flexible product management, PDF creation of invoices; packing slips and mailing labels, flexible tax; shipping and discount modules, newsletter management support including mailman integration, account management features” Congratulations are in order for the hard-working Satchmo team, they’ve been working on this release for quite a while! Matt Waite wrote in this week about the most recently Django-powered application he’s developed for his employer, The St. Petersburg Times. It’s called PolitiFact: “It’s a Django driven take on the old newspaper “truth squad” story. We’re taking things the presidential candidates are saying during the campaign and fact checking them. All of them get put into our databases, and users can browse by all kinds of different things.” Matt has more to say about the application, PolitiFact, on his blog. Justin Driscoll also wrote in about his new Django Google Code projects. The first is django-pressroom which serves as a complete public relations section for your site, complete with articles, photos, galleries, and file attachments. The next application was abstracted out of django-pressroom’s photo gallery functionality. This application is named django-photologue and should be a perfectly suitable photo gallery for any Django application you’re already working on. On what makes his applications special, Justin had the following to say: “The highlight of both apps (in my opinion) is the ability to specify PhotoSizes in the database. These PhotoSizes define the dimensions and parameters of resized copies of the uploaded image that will be generated from the source image and cached upon first request. If the PhotoSize is changed or deleted these cashed versions are removed. In addition, methods are added to the Photo model at runtime to access the cached images such as ” photo.get_mysize_url()” where “mysize” is the name of a defined PhotoSize in the database.” Code snippets and tutorials: Joe Heck, driven by his experiences at OSCON, has developed a local queueing service in Django, django-queue-service. Joe wanted to provide a foundation for a tool that would help developers queue background tasks from their Django applications in a fashion similar to Amazon’s Simple Queue Service: “At OSCON 2007, I was hunting around for something to use to deal with background processing initiated from my web application. Not finding anything that I could immediately use and implement, I took it as a challenge to knock out something in the time I was there. The result is the django queue service.” Since Jacob’s initial success at getting Django installed on the iPhone, Jay Baird has been hard at work documenting the process as well as developing an application for the device: “The most intriguing [idea] to me has been the use of django as a full fledged framework for on/off-line applications where edge network usage just seems silly… I’ve been working on an online flight database for a while now and decided that it’d be cool to create an iPhone application that does the same that can sync with the main database when we become connected and want to push these records up.” Björn Kempén has developed a very simple middleware-based IP banning solution: “I wanted a simple way to ban users from accessing one of my django made homepages, and then having them redirected to a page with an explanation why. The IP’s and explanations should be entered through the django admin interface. For this django middleware is a decent choice.” If you use Mint for analytics on your site, you might be interested in Maura Chace’s post, Minty Django. Maura was interested in being able to view her website statistics along side all of the data in her custom-built Django weblog. In the post above, she details the process she undertook and the two small issues she encountered. Thanassis Tsiodras has an excellent and in-depth tutorial on how he was able to build an offline Wikipedia browser using Django as the front-end. Frederik Lundh moved his site, effbot.org to Django a few weeks back and has now posted some useful snippets of code that he’s developed for monitoring his memcached instance. James Tinksy has posted a tutorial on paginating filtered query sets in a generic view: “I’m no Django expert. Hopefully someday I can call myself one but for now I’m stumbling through learning the basics. Most of it’s deceptively easy once you grok the concepts. You see I come from ASP classic and PHP 4 world where spaghetti code is the norm. In other words, I wasn’t groking the simple, elegance of Django.” James wasn’t kidding when he said this tutorial’s name packed a mouthful, but it doesn’t make the content any less interesting or useful; James does an excellent job of detailing his thought process throughout the article. If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

Django project news: Adrian Holovaty proposed and ultimately implemented a new feature this past week that greatly enhances the process of developing your Django application. Summarized greatly, Adrian’s opening post put it like this: ... [More] “wouldn’t it be useful we made it easy to run the Django development server with fixture data?” The new django-admin.py command, --testserver, is implemented as of revision [5912] and allows developers to load the development server with a test (temporary) database, populated with a set of fixture data. There's a bit more going on with this command that's detailed in the documentation. On quite the roll this week, Adrian also spearheaded a re-factoring of the django.core.management code in [5898], converting the previously 1700 line python script into a package that will eventually allow developers of 3rd party applications to add management functions without patching core Django code. Currently the existing code has been refactored and initial documentation can be found in the SVN repository at this time. There are still a few minor bugs to be ironed out, but all signs point to this change being a blessing for 3rd party developers. The Google Summer of Code program is coming to a close today (Monday, August 20). This will mark the point at which students will be able to commit their code for inclusion in Django (if necessary) and allow external developers to work on their projects. In this session, Django had four student developers working on projects. Keep your eyes peeled over the next few days and weeks for the students’ final official updates. Certainly, and hopefully, many of these fine individuals will go on to maintain their projects and perhaps become regular contributors to the Django community. If you’ve foundtheir projects useful, please be sure to thank them for their hard work and contributions. I’ve taken this opportunity to list and summarize each of the projects below: Thejaswi Puthraya’s django-check-constraints: Adds range- and value-based check constraints at the model level. Andreas Stuhlmüller’s django-rest-interface: Provides tools that allow you to easily RESTify your Django applications. Janis Leidel’s django-package: Adds a command to django-admin.py that creates a standalone package of your application. Seeks to help developers easily package and distribute their Django applications. Finally, Paul Collier’s django-object-level-caching: Extends the Django caching framework to the Queryset level. New Django sites of note: Technically, I ran across this site last week but through some sort of technical blunder, it escaped my roundup. Noonhat is a Django-powered site that lets you meet people in your area for lunch. You make an account, associate an email address, pick a geographical location, and specify a radius in which you’d be willing to travel for lunch. If another user’s circle intersects yours, and your availability matches up, you can be paired for a lunch. The point behind Noonhat is to help nearby people meet each other and have conversations with individuals whom you might not normally ever meet under normal circumstances. Marco Gabriel contacted me this week to let me know that he and Open Source Publishing Germany will be producing a German-language Django book, Django. Einführung in das Django Web Framework. Marco has also begun work on djangobuch.de which is a German language website to compliment the publication. Marco would also like to hear about any efforts to organize a German Django community (i.e. djangoproject.de) in the vein of Django Brasil, Django en español, Django-fr, and Django Japan. Code snippets and projects: A natural consequence of iPhone hacking is the installation of Django. Jacob Kaplan-Moss did just that. The iPhone uses CoreData for almost all of its storage needs and thus nearly all the information stored on the iPhone is inside SQLite databases. Pairing this information with a local install of Django and the inspectdb functionality allows anyone to create a web interface capable of viewing and editing anything on the iPhone. Jacob has yet to document his accomplishment in detail, so you’ll have to settle for Flickr. Django ‘It worked!’ screen on iPhone. Parsing the iPhone’s SQLite databases in Django. Tim Baxter has posted a method on his blog for generating microformats—specifically vCard—using Django: “If you use Django, it seems inevitable that the database will quickly have a lot of data that just lends itself to microformats, particularly calendar events and contact information. So, I’ve been playing around with microformats quite a bit lately and spitting out hcalendar and hcard microformats all over the place” One of the holy grails of content management is a dead-simple method for capturing and displaying a list of every change made to your data. This can now be implemented almost perfectly (there are a number of missing features, most notably relationships) in your existing Django application with only a single line of code in your Django model. Check out the AuditTrail page in the wiki for more explanation, code, caveats, and documentation. Bruce Kroeze has posted a lighttpd configuration on his blog that allows developers to serve their Django application through both standard HTTP and SSL-enabled HTTPS without any troubles. This is an especially important thing to get right when deploying a shopping cart application like the Satchmo Project. The 10percentofeverything.com blog illustrates how you can easily interact with your Django application from command line scripts: “Sometimes, I need to write command-line scripts to populate a database with information from some other source, like a webpage or third-party database. Since Django uses MySQL (among others) for its backend storage, it’s fairly easy to use Perl or any other language for this task. Problem is, it’s very boring and fiddly, so now I tend to use Django instead, which is really easy.” Linux Journal, a monthly magazine, has published an article on getting started with Django: “It would be misleading to say that Django is a Python port of Rails (or vice versa)... Both aspire to make Web development fun and easy, removing as much of the drudgery as possible from such work. Both use the model-view-controller (MVC) paradigm for handling actions and creating pages. Both use a particular programming language throughout the system for code and configuration files. And, both have managed to rally a large following, ensuring that they both will continue to be developed for some time to come.“ If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

Django news: Browsing through the repository checkins for trunk, I noticed that Malcom and Adrian had checked in over 50 patches for mostly bug-fixes to both code and documentation. If you’ve been waiting for a specific fix, take a look ... [More] through the list. Thanks to everyone involved in working to get those 50 patches integrated into trunk! New Django sites of note: Fredrik Lundh, maintainer of effbot.org, is currently porting over the "zone" (where things like PIL, Tkinter, and more are documented) to Django: “All in all, the zones at effbot.org currently contain around 2,000 documents, plus a couple of hundred user comments. Until now, the zone has been served as static HTML, generated and maintained using an increasinly disorganized collection of CGI scripts and off-site tools. Given that we moved pythonware.com to Django late last year, it’s about time I did the same to effbot.org.” Fredrik has written up his experiences during this process in a document which I highly recommend. Code snippets and projects: Maximillian Dornseif has posted a method for determining code-coverage of your Django project’s tests without having to alter any of the Django internals: “Siddharta Govindaraj has a blogpost on integrating Django with coverage.py to check what your tests actually test. Siddharta patches Django to archive his goals. But you can get the same results without fiddeling with Django’s Source-Code. Django now comes with a TEST_RUNNER setting which let’s you switch your testing engine.” Massimo Scamarcia sent me an email about his blog post that explains how you can create a basic Django-powered photo gallery in only a few minutes. Michael Trier points us to a few different techniques for peeking inside Django’s ORM to see what database queries your application is generating. Ross Poulton has written a blog post detailing how to configure and use subdomains with your Django project: “As a part of my previously mentioned upcoming bridal gift registry project (which, by the way, performed outstandingly in it’s most important private beta ever – my own wedding) I’m giving each user (in this sense, a user is a couple close to getting married) their own subdomain off of the main website – instead of having a URL to their registry like http://yourdomain.com/registries/view/?id=1048 there are beautiful URL’s like http://couplesnames.yourdomain.com.” Do you ever find yourself writing the same lines of code at the top of your views? Nathan Ostgard did and he’s such a dedicated DRY’er that he wrote a specialized middleware to clean up his code: “Having the same few lines at the top of every function in makes me feel dirty. You can clean this up with a Middleware class, replacing foo_id with the actual object before calling the view.” If you find yourself in the same situation as Nathan, head over to his blog, read his post, and hopefully make use of his middleware! If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

Starting with this week I've begun formatting this report a bit differently. The order of these sections are quite arbitrary and may change from week-to-week as I find out which work out on a consistent basis. Feel free to comment on the new format ... [More] in the comments below. Helpful articles and links: Michael Trier has written a lengthy article on his blog detailing some of the common issues people run into with Django’s syndication framework. He then describes a process you can follow to successfully get your feeds up and running. Digging through items in del.icio.us tagged with ‘django’, I ran across this nifty Google search that returns a listing of all Google Code projects with ‘django’ in the title. Of course, I found a lot of known projects, but it was interesting to see all the others that don’t get publicized as often. Code snippets and projects: Last week we let everyone know that James Tauber had begun his work on fully fleshing out Atom support in Django. Less than a week later and James has completed his work. Check out James’ implementation of RFC 4287 for Django at its Google Code repository. A newcomer to the Django community known only as ‘mamcx’ has begun the work necessary to complete the MSSQL backend. This backend had been left in a state of disarray as its original maintainers lost interest and the core of Django evolved over the past few years. Mamcx has already put in considerable work, but is somewhat new to Python and Django, so any assistance would obviously be much appreciated! Check out [5062] for his patches and comments. Here’s a method of defining a set of URLs in your Django project that will never get cached. Derek Willis has implemented iCal feeds in his Django application and written a subsequent post detailing how you can do it too. Using the excellent vObject library in tandem with Django (and applying a few idiosyncratic tweaks to make IE/Outlook happy) is very simple and eliminates the need for the developer (i.e. you) to develop any iCal templates! Bradley Whittington has a series of posts on his blog that detail his development of a Django middleware to log statistics about users to a database. Part one details the construction of a data model to hold this information and how to log this information within a middleware component. Part two goes over one process by which you can aggregate this data in meaningful ways. New Django sites of note: FrePPLe came to my attention through a user-submitted email. FrePPLe is a specialized application for production planning in the manufacturing industry. It was described to me thusly: “A first part of it is an extensible planning engine written in c (with bindings exposed in Python). The second part is the user interface and data persistence layer. For this I have become excited about django: Django’s flexible and efficient framework provides the ideal foundation. Also, the Django mindset and design principles match very well with the easy-to-extend, easy-to-customize and easy-to-use goals of my project.” Check out the screenshots of FrePPLe and see how they’ve put the Django admin interface to work in some interesting ways. Splice is an web application that allows users to upload, edit, and mix their music, as well as connect musicians from all over the world. Not only is this a really cool idea for a web site, it has a great design, and it’s written in Django! If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

Siddharta Govindaraj has recorded an excellent screencast and posted it on ShowMeDo that illustrates how a relatively inexperienced Django programmer can create a basic Wiki application in 20 minutes. Having trouble convincing your superiors ... [More] that Django is a proven and reliable technology? Several Django developers at OSCON had that sort of issue. Coming out of those talks, Rob Hudson is now looking for individuals and companies who have had success with Django to contribute “Django success stories” to the Django wiki. Please add your own, and keep an eye on the page if you’re looking for that extra bit of ammunition to further your Django advocacy at work. This week in GSoC news, Thejaswi Puthraya’s django-check-constraints project has gained ‘like’ and ‘between’ check conditions and more doctests. Thejaswi has also added a short tutorial on his site demonstrating how to use his project with newforms. James Tauber has wanted a complete implementation of the Atom Publishing Format in Django for a long time: “You can’t produce full-content feeds without some hacking and the more advanced features of Atom are not supported. And Django certainly doesn’t have support for the Atom Publishing Protocol, which just got approved as an IETF Proposed Standard.” Just this past week, James has begun his project at Google Code, django-atompub to see his ambitions realized. The project’s first phase will be to complete the publishing format, but the future plans include fully implementing APP (Atom Publishing Protocol), which looks as if it will be bit more challenging—but certainly more rewarding as well. Producing Django applications that can be cleanly distributed and included into other people’s projects has been a hot topic on the mailing lists this past week. The result of this discussion are many updates, clarifications, and new information on the Best Practices to Work with 3rd Party Apps wiki page: “Working with 3rd party / reusable applications used to be a pain for me as they are meant to live outside of your project folder structure, they either needed to live in your python site-packages folder or added to the python path; otherwise you would not be able to include them in your INSTALLED_APPS, use them in your project at all and you will end up seeing lots of “ImportError?: No module named …” type of errors.” Russell Keith-Magee has developed a patch for the Django testing framework which allows a user to run only individual tests of a particular test suite. If you’d like to test out this new functionality, check out a copy of the Django trunk greater than revision [5769]. Will Larson has developed a handy Django middleware that inserts your Google Analytics javascript code into your templates. Whether or not you find this middleware particularly useful, you may be interested in reading the article anyway. Will does an excellent job of describing the entire process of developing his project, and thus it also serves as a great tutorial on designing your own custom middleware projects. Nathan Ostgard explains a use-case in which a Django application needs to be completely restricted to logged-in users and where only a few pages can be accessed by anonymous users. This runs contrary to the built-in decorators in Django which allow for specifying which sections of your site should allow authenticated users. Nathan has implemented a custom middleware that restricts all views to logged-in users without having to decorate them all manually. For those pages which need to be accessed by anonymous users, you can use Nathan’s @allow_anonymous decorator. Jeremy Dunck, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, and Simon Willison gave a talk as OSCON titled Django Master Class which touched on some concepts that are usually left out of most Django presentations. The presentation covers topics such as unit testing, signals, custom fields, OpenID, and more. The slides are online at the link above along with the presenters notes which makes the read even more worthwhile. Instant Django is a standalone, and portable installation of the Django environment for Windows users: “No installation is required. Simply download the self-extracting executable, double-click, and place the resulting ‘django’ folder in a convenient location. You can even carry it around with you on a USB thumb drive. The portable Django development environment also works with the official tutorial. Be aware that it uses the builtin Django development web server, so it can not and should not be used for deployment of Django projects.” Are you working with the Facebook API in your Django application? Would you like to? A tutorial has cropped up on the Facebook Developers Wiki that details how you can do just that. In the final bit of “middleware” news for this roundup, I came across a very interesting bit on DjangoSnippets this past week. This middleware, by exogen, detects when your visitors have arrived from a search engine: “This isn’t actually middleware in the sense that it defines any of the middleware interfaces. It’s intended to be the base for a middleware method that you write, depending on what you want to happen when you detect that the visitor came from a search engine. In the example process_view method, I detect when the request is going to use the object_detail view and log the search query for that object in the database.” Jared Kuolt’s patch to allow Django’s shortcuts, get_object_or_404 and get_list_or_404, to accept QuerySets has been checked into Django as of revision [5796]. If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

It's our two-year anniversary! Django was open-sourced exactly two years ago today, on July 15, 2005. The past two years have been tremendous. If you're just starting to use Django, you're probably not aware of the huge improvements we've made ... [More] since the framework was open-sourced: Two years ago, we didn't have an internationalization framework. Two years ago, models looked like this: class Package(meta.Model): db_table = 'packages' fields = ( meta.CharField('label', 'label', maxlength=20, primary_key=True), meta.CharField('name', 'name', maxlength=30, unique=True), ) ordering = (('name', 'ASC'),) def __repr__(self): return self.name Two years ago, we didn't have the render_to_response() shortcut. You had to load templates manually using get_template(), create a Context and call t.render(c). Two years ago, we didn't have manage.py runserver. The only way to deploy, or even test, Django code was to set up mod_python! (We changed that pretty quickly.) Two years ago, we didn't have a way to do sessions. Two years ago, we didn't have support for database transactions. But even more striking than these changes is the fact that the framework's general design has remained consistent. Despite loads of new shortcuts and functionality, it still boils down to URLconfs, models, views and templates. If you beamed in a Django developer from the year 2005 and showed her the July 2007 Django trunk, she would more-or-less understand how it worked. Here's to the future. Thanks for using and improving Django! [Less]

Malcolm Tredinnick wrote in this week and wanted everyone to know that in [5708], a change was made to the translation framework that now requires all PO files to be UTF-8 encoded: “This change only affects third-party developers who are using ... [More] Django’s make-messages.py script to extract their strings for their own PO files. The PO files will need to be saved and edited as UTF-8 files and the charset set correctly in the header of the file. All of Django’s core translation files already satisfy this requirement.” Peter Sanchez caught my attention with a post on his blog that details the process of pinging the Technorati search engine from Django. There are, of course, several other methods of doing this. If you’re interested in pinging Technorati, check out all three. Not new, but not yet covered here is Christian Metts’ typogrify filter for Django. Jeff Croft, Christian’s co-worker at World Online, has an excellent write up of the filters on his blog. The project’s Google Code page describes itself thusly: “Typogrify is a collection of Django template filters that help prettify your web typography by preventing ugly quotes and widows and providing CSS hooks to style some special cases.” For the visual among us, Christian hosts an example page demonstrating everything the filters do. Will Larson has written an excellent article on putting together a “dream server” for Django deployment: “The end product is an Ubuntu Feisty server using Apache2 and mod_python to serve Django, and lighttpd to serve static media. It uses memcached as its caching backend, and uses Postgres8.2 as its database. The machine built using these instructions is in fact running this blog, which is a Django application. I performed this installation on a SliceHost 256 meg slice, but they would apply equally well to any Ubuntu server (not so well to shared hosting).” Thejaswi Puthraya has updated the Google Summer of Code project, django-check-constraints, this past week. The SQL generation code that had previously been addded to management.py has been moved into the Check class and the whole project has been made compatible with the newly-available unicode friendly revisions of Django. If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

Database migration has been the topic of the week with Mike Heald’s dbmigration tool for Django applications. Mike describes the project: “This project attempts to allow you to apply schema migrations to your Django applications in an automated ... [More] way. It requires a little more up-front thinking than the schema evolution branches would make you do, but with the advantage that automated rollouts are much easier to do than in the standard Django trunk and the code is available and working right now.” Seemingly on the heels of Mike’s project, Derek Anderson, the author of the Summer of Code 2006 project schema-evolution, has updated his code to work properly with the 0.96 release of Django. Derek also states that the schema-evolution should work fine with the trunk version of Django as well. Jacob Kaplan-Moss has generated a photomosaic of sites that are powered by Django. Check it out, it’s pretty interesting! Jacob says: “A collection of Django-powered sites collected from the wiki and djangosites.org. This mosaic has about 650 out of the list of over 800 collected from those sites. Compare with a similar mosaic I made last year. Also available: the super-high-quality original (PNG, 8000×6000, 38 MB).” Nathan Ostgard has written an article demonstrating how to implement an undo mechanism to your Django applications: “It’s a pretty simple concept: add a trashed_at field to your model, with the default value of None. When delete() is called on an object, if trashed_at is None, set it to the current time but don’t delete it. If it’s not None, actually delete it from the database.” Stockphoto is a photo gallery application written in Django: “It is designed to integrate into existing dynamic websites built with Django, to be easy to install, and to have few prerequisites, both in terms of third-party modules and in terms of expectations about site layout. It attempts to make maximum use of built-in Django facilities (authentication, admin pages, generic views) as much as possible in order to provide the simplest possible photogallery application while providing a reasonably full set of features.” The first Satchmo-powered online store came online this past week. Abode living is hopefully the first in a long line of stores running on top of the Django-based online store application. If you haven’t heard of Satchmo before, take some time to poke around their site. They’ve also got a helpful mailing list and very lively group of developers working on the project. If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]

After several months of hard work, the unicode branch has been officially merged into trunk on July 4, 2007. The branch had been under constant development since April 7th, fixes a number of bugs, and makes Django fully unicode-friendly from top ... [More] to bottom. For those developers tracking trunk, please be aware that there may be a number of changes you may have to make to your applications to keep them from breaking. For help, see the quick checklist for porting your applications to work well with the new unicode-friendly version of Django. David Cramer, part of the development team over at Curse Gaming, has been involved in one of their internal projects that they’ve dubbed CacheManager. David leads off with the tease: “Tired of writing cache.set code?” The Curse team got tired of dealing with the relatively simplistic cache.get and cache.set methods that the Django caching framework exposes and built a friendly manager class to “store and retrieve cached objects.” The project also claims to help prevent data duplication as well as help you implement smart caching in your application with less headaches. There have been several updates on the Google Summer of Code front this past week: Jannis Leidel has been making progress on the django-package project. This project aims to make packaging and distributing Django applications as easy and pain-free as possible: “This week I continued to work on the “startapp” command of django.core.management and changed its default behaviour to create a standalone application (with skeleton files) when you run: “django-admin.py startapp myapp”. Current skeleton files are: release.py, setup.py, MANIFEST.in, docs/, test/, myapp/, myapp/templates/myapp…” Thejaswi Puthraya’s django-check-constraints project gained compatibility with the newly-checked-in Oracle code and is rapidly gaining doctests. The project’s Google Code page also gained a test project, complete with applications, readme files, install files, and screenshots of for those who were unable to watch Thejaswi’s screencasts. Finally, Andreas Stuhlmüller’s django-rest-interface project is nearing a stable state: “The basic framework is done. If you feel experimental, give it a try and take a look at the RESTful API for your Django models, the serialized (JSON, XML) or templated output, the authentication mechanisms and the automatically generated URL patterns. Of course, I can’t give any guarantee that by the end of the SoC project any specific feature will still look like it does now—and I am fairly certain that it will be a lot easier to use custom URLs then than it is now.” In addition to the Django En Español and Django-FR user groups, there is also a Django Brasil group for Portuguese-speaking Djangoists. The group has been fairly active since December 2006 and shows no signs of slowing down! Since our highlight of the new Django-powered social messaging application Pownce last week, the site’s notoriety and exposure have exploded. Mike Malone interviewed the lead developer of Pownce, Leah Culver, about Pownce’s roots as well as the technologies that power the site. It’s a good bet that if you’re reading this post you’re at least a little interested in Django. Are you also interested Adobe’s cross-platform framework, Flex? If so, you might find Ian Millington’s Django and Flex blog to be very interesting. This last bit isn’t strictly Django-related, but I think enough Django developers would be appreciative of Adrian Holovaty’s newest project, TemplateMaker. TemplateMaker is a Python library that takes any number of inputs, raw HTML for example, and learns which bits of that input are constant and which change from page to page. The end result is a template, with holes present where the dynamic content once was. I’m envisioning the endless uses of this library in my own Django applications. Read Adrian’s introduction of the project on his blog. If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker [email protected]. [Less]