I released a small reusable app for adding an FAQ section to your site titled django-faq. It may seem a bit boring since it really isn't a complicated solution but I did make sure to include some "reusable app" best practices and even an example project that details how to make use of those practices. It's also hosted by GitHub, my new favorite social distributed source control system. Check out the project.
This month's django-nyc was hosted at Huge Inc and they couldn't have been more hospitable. Thanks to Loren Davie, co-founder of django-nyc, for hooking us up with the new location and for everyone at Huge for putting together a great environment for the meetup. We had food (I think I even saw some hummus somewhere along the amazing spread), drinks (aka beers) and a great presentation space. Oh, and we talked about NewFormsAdmin - including a great intro to nfa from Loren Davie, as well as a special presentation by Brian Rosner who provided a sneak peek presentation of his forthcoming DjangoCon presentation "What's New in NewForms-Admin".
Update: there are no files in SVN. That's a bummer. I'm keeping the post up because maybe it will introduce someone to SlideShowPro and maybe it will also entice the project own to push his files up to SVN for the rest of us to grab.
No, this isn't an official title ("Django Director") or a job opening (I guess it could be). Django-director is an open source project to manage the awesome SlideShowPro flash based image gallery application. I've had clients in need of a simple to use but very nice looking image gallery and SlideShowPro kills those two birds with one stone. SlideShowPro isn't free but it only costs $29. I think you'll be impressed. I just need to check this open source project out myself but I've been plenty happy with SSP so far. (check update above).
"SlideShowPro is a Flash-based slideshow application for presenting your photos and videos online. Available as a component for Flash and gallery extension for Lightroom, SlideShowPro features over 100 customizable parameters to control color, layout, size, and behavior for an endless array of configuration options. Both products were built to meet the demands of professional photographers, as well as web developers looking for a fast, simple utility to create slideshows without coding any ActionScript. "
Jeff Croft is a designer, author, conference speaker, programmer, web strategist, and well, a jack of all trades. He was one of the initial bloggers I followed when first digging into Django, and still follow to this day. He's apt at creating controversial blog posts, drawing both critique and praise for his musings. And he also is a great resource in blogging about tips and tricks regarding Django and design. After reading his latest post (not this one) I knew it would be a great time to have Jeff on and talk Django, design, mobile, djangocon, and a few other things. It runs about 30 minutes.
"FLOSS Weekly is a free software / open source (FLOSS) themed podcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It is hosted by Leo Laporte; his cohost for the first seventeen episodes was Chris DiBona and subsequently Randal Schwartz."
Django djblets it an interesting library of helper django code. It was created by the peeps behind the open source project ReviewBoard and the source for djblets can befound in the project's code base. Today they posted "Django Development with Djblets: Data Grids" which details a more intelligent table generation than your simple HTML table, including sorting, paging, highlighting, linking, data mapping, etc. Here's an example in action: user list.
Now, they have coupled the UI to the YahooUI library and ExtJS and that's the not too awesome part. Although those are both terrific and amazing libraries themselves, I just don't like being tied to an external js library when using a "reusable" app. Then again, if you were going to pick an external solution I suppose that one-two combo is one of the top contenders and they are looking for contributors to help support other libraries so I'll shut up. Anyhow, check it out. Here's the rest of the djblets source code and the post announcing the library with additional tutorials.
Djblet’s feature list currently consists of:
"A common task in many web applications is to display a grid of data, such as rows from a database. Think the Inbox from GMail, the model lists from the Django administration interface, or the Dashboard from Review Board. It’s not too hard to write something that displays a grid by doing something like..."
Eric Holscher is a new(?) blogger I've been following. He's an employee over at The World Company (think LJWorld, the birthplace of django) and he's joining the few people creating screencasts in the django community. His latest project is django-testmaker and what it does is offer a productivity boost by automating test generation.
Kudos to Eric for not only posting the code for the community to use and hopeful grow, but also tackling the often under appreciated task of creating a well executed screencast.
"At work lately we've been writing a bunch of tests for all of the work we've been doing. This is generally a good thing (tm). I was getting tired of manually having to write all of the code to test the views inside of my app. So I decide to write a little app that helps me automate the writing of tests. "
If you don't know Disqus (pronounced discuss) it's a service for commenting. Sounds boring, but it's not. In fact, they kind of took the concept of comments and turned it upside down. They made their feature rich service easy to implement on any site and then made it even simpler to manage your comments - both the ones you've submitted around the web yourself, and the ones other people left on your site. Oh, and the did this all using python, django and well... a lot of client side javscript I'd have to assume.
Just recently they announced in "Testing Django Applications" that they released a patch 7936 for implementing in browser testing using Selenium.
"This is a deal breaker. It makes Selenium tests much harder to write and maintain. As anyone who’s done testing knows, the harder tests are to write and maintain, the more likely they are to be ignored... So we here at Disqus decided this would a perfect opportunity to give something back to the Django community and help out anyone else setting out to do testing similar to ours."
I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the This Week In Django (TWiD) team as Community Evangelist. What does this mean? Michael and Brian officially announced my addition on this past week's TWiD podcast. What the heck is a Community Evangelist? Well, it could mean a lot of things actually.
If you haven't heard, with this weekend's django sprint we have the merge of the much anticipate newforms-admin branch. Huge congrats goes out to Brian Rosner and the django contributors who made this happen!
Brian put together an excellent tutorial and screencast to get you started. It's a must read/watch type of thing, so what are you waiting for? Watch it now.
"I am going to go in-depth about how to perform this migration. I have done so in the screencast and will also provide a textual version here as well."
"This week we have a special guest, Kevin Fricovsky, that joins us as we talk about DjangoCon, EuroPython, a few source commits, some cool projects from the community, and the Tip of the Week."
One of the reusable apps I see consistently mentioned in the djangosphere is basic-apps. The man behind the multi-app solution (blog, people, movies, books, profiles, music, places remarks, media, and inlines) is Nathan Borror, Interactive Art Director for LJWorld in Lawrence, Kansas — which just so happens to be the home where django was born. He's also responsible for the EveryBlock iconography, as well as a writing an excellent blog playgroundblues.com. We talked basic-apps, tumblog, blogging well, personal blogs, navigation, usability, minimalism, iconography, django and design, iphone, djangocon, django-nyc, python-nyc, django sprints, open sourcing your code, his flash mp3 player, and music. It's about 30 minutes long, enjoy!
When working with asp.net there's a neat little solution for taking your app "offline" or maintenance mode. It's called app_offline.htm and Scott Guthrie wrote a nice tutorial on how to implement it. But we're talking django today and now djangonauts have an open source solution of their own called django-maintenancemode. Essentially, think of it as a forced "splash" page where you can provide whatever message you want to your system users. The obligatory "we're upgrading the site" would work well here.
The developers of the open source project leveraged middleware to gracefully handle requests while still allowing "internal" users to access the admin, and any logged in user having "staff" credentials still have full access to the site. Rad! This is a nice feature to have and one I can see every django app implementing.
"Django maintenance mode is a middleware that allows you to temporary shutdown your site for non staff users and show them a page that the site is down for maintenance. Logged in users having staff credentials can still fully use the site."
All the cool kids are doing it, so why haven't you donated yet?
I like to take photos. My family says the pics I take are artsy fartsy. Whatever. When it comes time to share them though, they want to see them. Now, as a web worker we all know there's a few photo sharing options out there. Ok, there's a LOT of sharing options out there. Let's just talk Flickr and Picasa for now though. Given the choice between sharing photos with friends and family on either flickr or picasa, I choose picasa. Overall, I'm a picasa fan myself (their windows desktop app is amazing). But for simplicity sake, and I know flickr is working on making their sharing features easier to use, picasa is simple enough for your mom or dad. And if you ever had to share photos online with your non-web savvy relatives, you know you need the most simple solution available, otherwise you're in for email, phone calls, and essentially help desk support. If you want community though - flickr is the place to go. No question.
Anyway, here's a great new django reusable application for displaying your picasa web photos on your site. It comes with all the goodies like templates tags, and admin utilities.
"I wanted an easy way to get any random image from my Picasa Web public gallery onto my Web page, so I built this. It uses the RSS feeds provided by Google to first find all of the public albums. Then it finds all photos within the albums it finds. Basic information about each photo and album is then stored in the local database to make retrieval a bit faster. The local database can easily be refreshed when needed from the Django administration utility."
"Perhaps the most interesting part of the news is the location of the conference: it's scheduled to be held at Google's Mountain View, California headquarters.It's clear that the support for all things Python at Google isn't lagging."
I try to financially support every open source project I use. "Try" is the key word here. Hey, at least I'm being honest.
The Django Foundation recently reached out to the community asking to help support current and future sprints. Considering I use django every day of my life, in one form or the other, I felt obligated to support the team. You should do the same. (via brosner)
Reading the post raised a question... is there ever going to be a Django Foundation website, or is djangoproject.com now the home of Django Foundation? Anyone... anyone?
"With Django 1.0 around the corner, our immediate goal is to raise enough money to support the upcoming pre-1.0 coding sprints, which bring developers together in the real world for highly productive design and programming sessions. After the 1.0 release, we're planning to fund regularly scheduled sprints, user meet-ups and other community events."
Eric Florenzano rocks out his first two screencasts. The first is "Setting up a Django Development Environment" and the second is "Using Django-Pagination". Both are excellent and impressive for a first-go screencast noob.
I've done a few screencasts myself for the asp.net open source subsonic project, and I know that screencasts are not easy.There's a lot of prep and "runtime" eloquence needed to output an excellent screencast that is both entertaining and educational. Eric did a great job.
Btw - Is it me or do Eric and Rob Conery have the same exact voice? Maybe the same person? I jest.
"It's always been a goal of mine to post screencasts here on my blog, but for whatever reason I never ended up getting around to it. Today, that all changes as I have created two new screencasts. Of course, this space is already very well-covered by both Michael Trier and Brian Rosner, so hopefully this adds something new to the conversation. "
I love when I come across simple solutions to solve everyday problems. Clint Ecker just launched his new open source project django-chunks which does one thing and one thing well — allow for "chunks" of content to be rendered in your template via a key lookup. Want an example? You like editing your "about me" text on your homepage. Create a chunk instance for your "about me" and then edit to your heart content from the admin. There's 100 other uses for this. Clint walks you through the details via the link. Good one!
"This is really helpful in those cases where you want to use django.contrib.flatpages but you need multiple content areas. I hope this is helpful to people and I’ll be making minor edits as I see them necessary."
Kevin is a husband, father, web strategist, solution developer, information designer, researcher, and enjoys writing. He also enjoys a good cup of tea — learn more.
