Empty Thoughts

This Week in Django is a weekly podcast about all things Django.

This week we talk about EuroPython 2008, some cool posts and projects from the community, the Tip of the Week, and a question from the IRC.

Plus, we are fortunate to have a special appearance by Mike Axiak to discuss streaming uploads and ticket 2070.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

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Show Notes

Big News (1:01)

• EuroPython 2008 – To be held in Vilnius, Lithuania from Monday July 7th – Saturday July 12th. No Django sprint officially announced as of yet.

Tracking Trunk (3:55)

• Quite a few interesting changes in the GIS branch.
• Thank you to all the translators
• We’re working on an i18N show
  • A picture is worth a thousand words – Language distribution of Django web site visitors.

Community Catchup (7:37)

• SQLite Adding index changes LEFT OUTER JOIN to act as INNER JOIN – Malcolm Tredinnick pointed us to a problem in SQLite that was posted on the mailing list by someone called Dinobot. This isn’t a bug that’s Django’s fault and there’s not a lot that Django can do about it. So if you use SQLite and add your own indexes then you might want to rebuild SQLite from source code.

• Refactoring the Documentation – Jacob Kaplan-Moss posted to the Django-Developers discussion list that he is doing a ton of work to refactor the Django documentation structure, breaking it up based on stakeholders.
  • Sphinx – excellent Python documentation generator

• Streaming Uploads Discussion – Mike Axiak started a great discussion on some work he’s doing to handle streaming uploads. It’s been a very active discussion thread. I know that Mike is spending a ton of time working on this along with Ticket 2070 as he’s hanging out in IRC all hours of the day and night.
  • python-rfc2388 – Google Code project that provides a lazy RFC2388 HTTP multipart parser.
  • django-uploadutils – Will repackage up a bunch of useful upload utilities.
  • Ticket 5361 – FileField refactor being worked on by Marty Alchin

• json_encode – a great JSON encoding module by Wolfram Kriesing which he states is improved and simplified. If you are doing AJAX work you should really check this out.

• Internet lifestream with Django – For a second week in a row we feature another project by Nuno Mariz. Lifestream is developed using the Python FriendFeed API and some regular Django goodness. Check out Nuno’s Lifestream for an example.
  • jellyroll – Similar project by Jacob Kaplan-Moss that does not require a FriendFeed account.
  • Jeff Croft’s Blog – Excellent blog with great information on web design.

• Python Web Development with Django – Paul Bissex book on Rough Cuts. Estimated completion July 18.
  • This Week in Django 6 – Interview with Paul Bissex
  • Pre-order the Book on Amazon Today

• DjangoFriendly – is a community resource for finding the friendliest Django hosting environments. Designed and developed by Ryan Berg.

• Django Djblets – The Review Board team abstracted a set of useful helpers. Included are Authentication improvements, Flexible datagrids, Decorators, Caching functions, and Unit testing utility classes.
  • Clarification, in the show I said decorators for doing tagging, what I meant was decorator for doing a template tag. See the docs.

Tip of the Week (42:21)

• Last week’s Tip came from Alex Gaynor. Apologies for not mentioning it.

This week’s tip is for users of the newforms-admin branch. Even if you are not using newforms-admin, this might be something to make you look at newforms-admin or just keep in the back of your mind once it is merged into trunk.

It is very possible to define your own form for both the main form and any inlines. A FormSet class is used to make inlines work which is simply some abstraction to using more than one form around some data.

# your ModelForm (probably in forms.py)
class AdminPostForm(forms.ModelForm):

    class Meta:
        model = Post

    def clean_title(self):
        value = self.cleaned_data.get("title")
        # custom validation with value here
        return value

# your ModelAdmin (probably in admin.py)
class PostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = AdminPostForm
admin.site.register(Post, PostAdmin)

# your model
class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    body = models.TextField()

IRC Ad Nauseam (46:41)

Django IRC FAQ

Backwards Incompatible Changes Information

• DjangoBot Updates
  • Fixed the Time Zone bug caused by configuring settings manually because it doesn’t set the environment correctly.
  • Corrected caching problems by using file-based caching.
  • Urlize filter is very slow as detected by hotshot
  • Eric Florenzano is working on an optimized version. For more information on Eric listen to our interview with him on This Week in Django 11.

I just created a post for my new blog but the post is not showing up for about an hour. I’m using a date-based generic view. Is there some kind of caching going on?

It is possible that you have not set your time zone information appropriately in your settings file.

• Django Documentation on TIME_ZONE

• Available Time Zone Choices

Thank You! (54:30)

• Visit Brian Rosner’s website for the latest hotness!