Empty Thoughts

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

This week we do a DjangoCon retrospective, feature a special live interview with Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone, discuss a few source commits and some cool projects from the community.

Check it out…

Last weekend I had the unique privilege to attend and participate in DjangoCon, the first international Django based conference. It was a wonderful experience and I had the great opportunity to meet a lot of incredibly smart people. I was especially excited to be able to participate by Moderating two discussion panels and doing the This Week in Django show live. The whole thing was held at Google, which is just amazing, and they recorded all of the presentations and have made them available. I encourage you to . note, if you want higher quality videos watch them on YouTube and select “watch in high quality”. I participated in the following:

Panel: Django Technical Design

A technical design discussion panel featuring core developers: Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Adrian Holovaty, Simon Willison, James Bennett, Malcolm Tredinnick. This one was a ton of fun and I only wish we had more time. I had a bunch of questions that I did not get the opportunity to ask, and others that were covered in prior keynotes so I thought it was best not to harp on them any longer.

Panel: Schema Evolution

A panel discussion on Schema Evolution and three popular approaches to this problem for Django. Featured project leads Simon Willison (), Russ Keith-Magee (), Andrew Godwin (South). This panel had some spirited discussion on schema evolution and their different approaches. It seems that there are enough similarities that we will hopefully see some collaboration among the projects.

TWiD Live

Michael Trier & Brian Rosner do a live presentation of the This Week in Django podcast. We were a bit nervous about this one since in our regular weekly podcast we have an opportunity to stop and start or do certain item over again. With the exception of a couple of minor mistakes it turned out great and was tons of fun. I was quite surprised by the number of questions that were asked. The only bummer about this one right now is that it cuts off the intro and the outro, but we’re trying to get Google to restore that.

This Week in Django 36 has been posted. It’s a great episode with our special guest James Bennett. Hear James talk about the book, the blog, speaking, and a whole lot more.

This Week in Django 35 has been posted. Don’t miss it. We catch up with Robert Lofthouse, Chairman of DjangoCon and EuroDjangoCon.

This Week in Django 34 has been posted.

This week we discuss Django 1.0 Beta 1, a bunch of source commits, some cool projects from the community, and a tip of the week.

This Week in Django 33 has been posted.

This week we discuss the NEW This Week in Django site, a bunch of source commits, and some cool projects from the community.

All show notes from now on will be on the new This Week in Django dedicated site.

This Week in Django will be delayed this week. We hope to get it out by tomorrow evening. We have been experiencing technical difficulties. Thank you, and now back to our regular scheduled program…

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

This week we have a very special guest, Justin Bronn, creator of GeoDjango the GIS branch of Django. We also discuss 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

Downloads

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OGG Edition (34.4 MB, 1:08:44, 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 (0:48)

• DjangoCon tickets have come and go. If you didn’t get yours sign up for the waiting list.

• Version 1.0
  • Beta 1 scheduled to drop on 8/5/08.
  • Push to Beta 2 sprint – Friday August 8, 2008 in Lawrence, KS and on IRC (#django-sprint).
  • Django Sprint in Berlin

Interview – Justin Bronn (5:11)

Justin Bronn is a computer scientist and third-year law student at the University of Houston who enjoys studying legal topics related to intellectual property and spatial law. Prior to creating GeoDjango, Justin worked as a patent engineer for an intellectual property boutique in Houston and developed scientific data analysis applications for the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

CartoAnalytics is Justin Bronn’s consulting company. CartoAnalytics provides innovative solutions to harness the power of your geospatial data.

• Getting started with GeoDjango
  • GeoDjango Site
  • GeoDjango Wiki
  • GeoDjango Docs
  • GeoDjango: Web Applications for Geographers with Deadlines – Video of presentation From O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Burlingame, CA, May 14, 2008.
  • GeoDjango Presentation at FOSS4G2007
  • An IRC channel is available – join #geodjango on freenode.

• Other items mentioned
  • Houston Crime Maps – excellent reference application for GeoDjango.
  • The limited_related admin plugin.
  • Take Control of Your Maps – Excellent article by Paul Smith on using OpenLayers

• Open source geospatial libraries:
  • GDAL
  • GEOS
  • PostGIS
  • OpenLayers
  • Mapnik

• Data sources
  • OSGeo blog aggregate
  • Census Bureau TIGER/Line Shapefile page

Tracking Trunk (39:51)

• Addition of Intermediate Models (8136) – Excellent addition by Eric Forenzano and Russell Keith-Magee that allows you to add join models with extra attributes.
  • Django Model Documentation
  • Django Admin Documentation
  • Intermediary Models and PyMag – Blog post by Eric Florenzano discussing intermediary models.
• Implemented a secure password reset form (8162) – It uses a token and prompts user for new password, plus also adds base36 encoding and decoding.

• Ensure custom primary keys are shown on the formset (8179)

• Removed several deprecated features for 1.0 (8191) – Removes:
  • “simple” cache backend
  • ObjectPaginator
  • edit_inline_type argument for ForeignKey fields
  • QOperator, QNot, QAnd and QOr
  • maxlength argument

Community Catchup (48:10)

• – We’re renaming the project and the import point from extensions to django_extensions. This will happen in one week.

• Admin Image Widget Pete Baumgartner, LincolnLoop, posted this nice snippet that displays an image instead of a file path if the current file is an image. If you read the comments, another user updated the code generating the thumbnails to use the popular django open source project

• How Django is good for SEO Patrick Beeson is a project manager for E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, TN. In the past Patrick has published a few good django related posts but this was is of interest because it discussed one of the many “out of the box” application benefits the django toolset provides.

• – Asset management for Django. Automatically compresses javascript files. Supports the following filters: jsmin, jspacker, csstidy, cssutils, yui_js, yui_css, gzip, cssrewrite.

• Translating Django apps. Good practices – Great rundown by Marc Garcia on how to go about translating your Django applications. Marc is the Django localizer for the Catalan language. Learn more about Marc and localization on This Week in Django 20.

• Threaded Comments For Your Site Eric Florenzano’s article for the relatively new Python Magazine was published this month. Eric talks about his open source google code project and how to integrate the simple yet flexible threaded commenting system for Django-based websites.

Tip of the Week (1:00:50)

Use decorator_from_middleware to create a decorator that can be used in your views, which wraps up a middleware class.

from django.utils.decorators import decorator_from_middleware 
from django.middleware.middlewaremodule import MiddlewareClass 

decoratorfunc = decorator_from_middleware(MiddlewareClass)

This code is not documented but added as part of cache reworking. See this thread for more information:

Thank You! (1:03:19)

• 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

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.

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 (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

As we mentioned on This Week in Django 30 Kevin Fricovsky will be joining the podcast as a Community Evangelist. If you’re wondering what that’s all about and how Kevin fits into the show, check out his detailed post on the subject. Both Brian Rosner and I are extremely pleased to have Kevin’s help and support.