Empty Thoughts

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

This week we discuss Satchmo, the Django open-source E-Commerce application with Chris Moffitt and Bruce Kroeze. We also look at a few source commits and some cool projects from the community.

Apologies for some of the microphone noise.

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (89.3 MB, 1:52:43, AAC)

MP3 Edition (77.4 MB, 1:52:43, MP3)

OGG Edition (63.3 MB, 1:52:43, Vorbis)

The Enhanced Podcast version contains screenshots and easy access links to all of the items we discuss throughout the podcast.

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Give Us Feedback

Want to give us some feedback on the show? We’re always looking for ideas or suggestions that will help improve each episode. Please contact us at feedback __at__ thisweekindjango.com.

Show Notes

Big News (0:00)

• PyOhio was amazing. Kudos to Catherine Devlin for doing an awesome job.
• Django 1.0 Alpha – Test it out and provide feedback.
• Django Push to Beta Sprint – August 1 in Washington, DC and on IRC.

Interview – Satchmo Developers (8:33)

Satchmo is a Django based E-Commerce solution.

• Chris Moffitt – Project Lead
  • Satchmo Blog
  • Django People Page
• Bruce Kroeze
  • Coder’s Eye Blog
  • Solid Site Solutions
  • GoSatchmo – Commercial support site for Satchmo

• Mentioned Items
  • OSCommerce – Popular PHP based E-Commerce solution.
  • Pinax – reusable apps reference application.
  • Free Software Foundation
  • Ooh-Ga-Boo-Ga – Huge installation of Satchmo

Tracking Trunk (1:02:46)

• Changed/fixed the way Django handles SCRIPT_NAME and PATH_INFO (8015) – Basically, URL resolving will only use the PATH_INFO and the SCRIPT_NAME will be prepended by reverse() automatically. Allows for more portable development and installation. Also exposes SCRIPT_NAME in the HttpRequest instance.

• To ensure that a model BooleanField? has an explicit value set (8050): – Since it’s not required, by default, set the default properly in the constructor.

• Handle sitemaps with more than 50,000 URLs in them (8088) – Implemented by using pagination.
  • sitemaps spec limit of 50,000.

Community Catchup (1:08:41)

• Callcast – Discussion with Nathan Borror – Another great discussion by Kevin Fricovsky, this time with Nathan Borror.

• Semantic Django – David Larlet’s website where he archives a collection of open source semantic reusable django apps including such technologies as OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, RDF, FOAF, REST, Atom, Snippets and Patchs.

• Top ten things that suck about Django, revisited – Jeff Croft does a follow up article on a post he did two years ago updating the status of the items needing improvement.

• Automating tests in Django – Great post by Eric Holscher that goes through how to create integration tests for your Django applications in an automated way through the use of a Middleware that logs the test creation output to a file.
  • Automating Test Creation – Empty’s feedback on it.
  • Testmaker .002 – Eric updates us with new additions to his open source test project including adding a management command, making it simple to add TestMaker to your project just but adding a reference to INSTALLED_APPS.

• Building a Community Site with Django in 40 Hours or Less – Excellent writeup on the Lincoln Loop blog that shows how they quickly built out a Biking Trail application in Django on top of the Pinax platform.
  • Sphene Community Tools

• Django Subdomains – Every have the requirement to implement customized subdomains in your django app, mapping to a model key? It makes for clean, personal, simple to remember url (ex. username.yourappname.com). If you’ve ever used the popular Basecamp web application you’re familiar with their URL structure – [companyname].projectpath.com. This tutorials details how you can do the same as well as references other posts who attempted the same thing, and issues they all ran into along the way.

• Creator/updater fields for admin – Peter Baumgartner, LincolnLoop, recently got his hands dirty customizing a newforms-admin implementation and created a a customized ModelAdmin class that sets fields for models saved in admin corresponding to the user that created the object and the user that last updated the object. Seems trivial for the currently edited model but the catalyst for this was making sure inlines received the same auditing synchronization. He also leverage JQuery to provide additional client side logic.

• Replacing Django’s ORM with SQLAlchemy – Will Larson steps through how to use SQLAlchemy within Django but replacing the ORM.
  • Replacing Django’s ORM with SQLAlchemy – Empty’s feedback on it.
  • – another way to use SQLAlchemy with Django.

• FLOSS Weekly interviews Jacob Kaplan-Moss – Randal Schwartz interviews Jacob Kaplan-Moss at OSCON about Django.

Thank You! (1:46:38)

• NERD_Tree – Excellent VIM plugin that gives a project drawer like behavior.

• Brian Rosner
  • Brian Rosner Blog
  • TWiD Live

• Kevin Fricovsky
  • Monty Lounge Industries – Kevin’s web strategy, design, and development company.
  • How I Work Daily – Kevin’s blog

• Michael Trier
  • Empty Thoughts Blog

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

This week we talk about PyOhio, a source commit, Some cool projects / posts from the community, the Tip of the Week, and a question from the IRC.

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (21.3 MB, 35:18, AAC)

MP3 Edition (24.3 MB, 35:18, MP3)

OGG Edition (19.5 MB, 35:18, Vorbis)

The Enhanced Podcast version contains screenshots and easy access links to all of the items we discuss throughout the podcast.

Feeds Available

iTunes Feeds are available. By subscribing using the iTunes feeds the podcasts will automatically be downloaded for you when we release them.

iTunes Feeds

This Week in Django – AAC Edition

This Week in Django – MP3 Edition

Regular RSS Feeds

This Week in Django – AAC Edition

This Week in Django – MP3 Edition

This Week in Django – OGG Edition

Give Us Feedback

Want to give us some feedback on the show? We’re always looking for ideas or suggestions that will help improve each episode. Please contact us at feedback __at__ thisweekindjango.com.

Show Notes

Big News (1:14)

• PyOhio – Regional Python conference to be held in Columbus, Ohio on July 26, 2008. It is one full day of Python fun, and it is free!

• EuroPython – Monday 7th July – Saturday 12th July at Vilnius, Lithuania.

Tracking Trunk (3:59)

• Weekly Trunk stats by Rob Hudson – (Rob’s Cogitations)

{
'changeset': 17, 
'ticket_new': 45, 
'ticket_close': 14, 
'ticket_update': 62, 
'patch': 28, 
'wiki_edit': 29
}

• New setting that helps testing under twill (7537) – Adds a DEBUG_PROPAGATE_EXCEPTIONS setting that can be used for testing situations

Branching and Merging

• Check out brosner’s GitHub branch nfa_docs for his work on the newforms-admin documentation.

Community Catchup (8:47)

• Pocket Django – Paul Bissex describes how he simply setup Django on a jailbroken iPhone using the Cydia package manager.

• – Cool project by Janis Leidel. It loads template data from your database. All templates are editable via the admin interface. Nice for django.contrib.flatpages templates or default error templates.

• Exploring Mixins with Django Model Inheritance – Another great post by Eric Florenzano discussing how to use mixins with the model inheritance features in Django trunk.
  • Peevalizer.com – Speaking of Eric Florenzano, he and Tony Hauber just released Peevalizer.com a new social networking site for people to list and discuss things that irritate them.

• Web frameworks: a free software oriented study – following on last weeks discussion of lines of code comparisons between Rails and Django, MiningLabs presents a comparison between Rails, Django, and Seam. There’s lots of pretty graphs.

• – Another Django book set to be released this year. This one is by Marty Alchin and we expect it to be very good advanced book on Django.

• Django Admin Omnigraffle Stencil – Wonderful stencil for OmniGraffle (mac os x), created by Alex Lee, containing all of the common UI elements seen in the Django admin interface, as a tool for wireframing. This link came to us through Simon Willison’s blog.

Tip of the Week (23:01)

The URLconf in Django will short-circuit when it matches a pattern. This is good because it can allow one to override URLs and map them to their own views. This is the fundamental base of how one can create their own admin interfaces.

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/bookstore/report/$', 'bookstore.admin_views.report'),
    (r'^admin/', include('django.contrib.admin.urls')),
)

Your view might look like this:

from mysite.books.models import Book
from django.template import RequestContext
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.contrib.admin.views.decorators import staff_member_required

def report(request):
    return render_to_response(
        "admin/books/report.html",
        {'book_list' : Book.objects.all()},
        RequestContext(request, {}),
    )
report = staff_member_required(report)

It is important to use the staff_member_required decorator to protect the view from unwanted eyes.

IRC Ad Nauseam (28:16)

Django IRC FAQ

Backwards Incompatible Changes Information

I want to be able to check if a template variable is empty, how can I do that?

We see lots of questions that relate in some form or another to being able to test for empty or None conditions within the templates. The documentation on the if tag is pretty clear, but just as a refresher here’s how it plays out:

It uses Python’s Truth Value Testing. a template variable that is:

• None
• False
• zero of any numeric type, for example, 0, 0L, 0.0, 0j.
• any empty sequence, for example, ’’, (), [].
• any empty mapping, for example, {}.
• instances of user-defined classes, if the class defines a __nonzero__() or __len__() method, when that method returns the integer zero or bool value False.3.1

• Django Documentation on if tag

Thank You! (33:28)

• brosner on Twitter. Check out his blog.