Empty Thoughts

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

This week we discuss the NewForms-Admin merge into Trunk, DjangoCon, a few source commits, some cool projects from the community, and the Tip of the Week.

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

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Show Notes

Big News (0:47)

• NewForms-Admin Branch Merges to Trunk – A huge step towards Version 1.0.
  • Version 1.0 Sprint Schedule
  • NewForms Admin Documentation
  • Updated NewForms Documentation
  • newforms-admin Migration and Screencast – Great way to get started and make the migration to NewForms-Admin.
  • Pre-NFA Merge Tag

• DjangoCon Web Site and DjangoCon Schedule Released – It’s quite a lineup. We hope to see everyone there.

Tracking Trunk (15:04)

• Support for pre-1900 dates (7946)
  • Missing Files From 7946 (7950)

• Removed the mysql_old backend (7949) – According to Malcolm Tredinnick, it smells bad and has no friends.

• updated generic create_update views to use newforms (7952)

• newforms -> forms switch (7971) ** django.newforms is now django.forms. Updated your code.

• Added support for optgroups in models and form fields (7977)
  • Documentation on new optgroups support

• Performance Improvements for urlize and urlizetrunc filters (7985) – This one has bit us on the Django Logger.

• Exception on 400 Response Fallback to 500 Response (7988)

Community Catchup (26:16)

• Kevin Fricovsky – joins the This Week in Django team as Community Evangelist. Kevin will be working to produce the show, contacting guests, gathering news items, coming up with ideas. Kevin has been doing this work regularly anyway so it’s great of him to team up with us to help out the program:
  • Monty Lounge Industries – Kevin’s web strategy, design, and development company.
  • How I Work Daily – Kevin’s blog. You should have this one in your feedreader.

• PyWorks conference – to be held in Atlanta, GA on November 12-14, 2008.

• PyOhio – Reminder that this free one day conference is in Columbus, OH on July 26, 2008.

• – via Kevin Fricovsky using the new Twitter Search capability to track all tweets about django.

• Jinja2 Final aka Jinjavitus Released – Armin Ronacher and the rest of the Pocoo team announced the release of this wicked-fast Django inspired template engine.

• OSCON Python BoF – Tuesday, July 22nd 7pm – 10pm from Jax Bar and Restaurant. Via Jason Kirtland’s excellent blog discorporate.

Tip of the Week (38:32)

This tip comes to us via Ben Jao Ming in his post Django auto-translation of field values.

If you need to translate content in a field then gettext is not going to help you out. Since you can create your own custom fields it’s easy to wrap a CharField with the translation behavior:

from django.db import models
from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _

class AutoTranslateField(models.CharField):
    __metaclass__ = models.SubfieldBase
    def to_python(self, value):
        return str(_(value))

Just add whatever translations you know of to the locale file and run compilemessages.

Thank You! (42:45)

• – Awesome video by Bram Moolenaar
  • Vim Cheatsheet PDF

• Brian Rosner
  • Brian Rosner Blog
  • TWiD Live

Brian Rosner just released a new screencast and blog post, newforms-admin Migration and Screencast, that walks you through how to get started with migrating to NewForms-Admin from your existing trunk based code. The screencast and accompanying blog post are very well done. It’s great to get this kind of helpful information, especially from someone that knows so much about the internals of the code.

I highly encourage everyone to check it out, especially if you’re on the fence on whether or not the conversion is worth it. Brian shows how easy it is to get started.

In this screencast I cover converting an existing application to the NewForms-Admin Branch of Django. We will cover hooking the NewForms-Admin into our urls.py module, extracting out the inner Admin class information into a NewForms-Admin class, handling the prepopulate_from, and organizing our admin class information into a separate module.

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Show Notes

NewForms-Admin Branch Wiki Page – The NewForms-Admin documentation on the Django Wiki site.

Django Installation Documentation – Covers how to install Django. You will need to go through similar steps when installing the NewForms-Admin branch.

Using Git with Django Screencast – Excellent screencast that gives a nice introduction to working with Git and Django together.

Source code is available in the Source Code download link above. Apparently a lot of people miss that. The source for the application can be downloaded and used under the MIT License.

I think someone is reading my mail, or should I say mind. For the past several days I had been drafting a preliminary patch and rationale for proposing that the manage.py system be opened up to allow extensibility of custom commands. My initial motivation for this functionality was due to my Newforms Generator. I wanted to be able to inject this behavior into manage.py without having to submit a patch and get buy-in. Well thankfully it looks like someone else had the same exact idea. With Changeset 5925 we get this functionality.

Coming from Ruby / Rails world I have really missed Rake and the simple extensibility of that tool to automate common tasks. Now with extensibility in manage.py I can do a lot of the same things I was accustomed to previously.

The docs online are not updated yet to reflect this change but the Changeset patch has all the information you need to get started.

Very cool stuff.

UPDATE

As noted in the comments, it looks like this one was rolled backed for a bit. Something about it not working. :) I’m sure the required fixes will be put in place shortly.