Django Rocks

Django development server / runserver replacement

2010-12-02T19:22:07+00:00

My usual development install of Django has consisted of the following;

Django
django-compress
django-debug-toolbar
Custom addons I’ve built

Today, I come across something else that might make it into my development dev install. django-devserver.

The default runserver is pretty good to get going quickly. However django-devserver includes some nice extras specifically for the development process. The following are displayed in the terminal, depending on config;

SQL queries
Profile summary
Cache summary
Memory use
AJAX output
Session info

django-devserver is also available for install using easy_install.

Note: The django-devserver and django-debug-toolbar don’t play well together.

New Tutorial - Custom / IMAP Authentication Backend

2010-11-13T13:28:40+00:00

I thought it was time to add another tutorial - and this news post, in an attempt to keep the site updated.

Last week I added Running from a Cron Job (Scheduled task) into the Hints & Tips section.

Today, I have added Creating a Custom Authentication Backend to the Tutorials.

As the name suggests, the idea is to create an alternative authentication method for your Django application. In this case I have chosen IMAP as it was a simple backend to implement. It’s a little shorter than I would like for a tutorial, but better than nothing.

Enjoy.

Django 1.2 E-commerce review

2010-09-02T19:08:50+00:00

I have finally added the first review in the recommended reading section. There really should be a real reviews section, at the moment it’s just a static page…unfortunately time constraints are weighing heavy at the moment.

So, anyway, here it is.

New “Recommended Reading”

2010-06-02T18:51:47+00:00

For when Tutorials & Snippets just are not enough to learn some aspects of Django in detail, this site now has a recommended reading section.

This has books that I personally have read, or am reading. There are currently two books listed, both really do go hand in hand. Django 1.2 E-commerce & Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging. More details on these is available here as well as reviews to come in the near future.

Details of the 2 books & Sample chapters are also available from the publishers sites;

Mail Staff

2009-12-13T11:46:16+00:00

I decided on another for the Hints & Tips, giving you the ability to E-mail your staff, rather than admins or managers, both require updating the settings file.

Mail Staff

I’ve also created a Hints & Tips news category.

Enjoy.

Hints & Tips, better than nothing :)

2009-11-18T17:46:28+00:00

Well, unfortunatly, I have not yet had time to test the tutorials. So instead, I’ve added 3 posts to Hints & Tips

Hopefully these help with your Django application development and I honestly do intend finishing off the tutorials.

New Tutorials……soon

2009-11-02T17:46:02+00:00

My apologies. I had intended on adding 2 new tutorials this last weekend, as well as another way to create unique slugs, however my time has been required elsewhere. Because of this I have not yet been able to finish checking the tutorials. I would prefer to know they work, rather than having an epic fail moment. Hopefully these will be up and running in the next few days, along with a couple of other additions to the sites functionality.

Dynamic Forms

2009-10-15T14:07:54+00:00

Recently I have been doing work with form fields populated from the database. Obviously this, as standard, is not supported by Django.

After quite some time search, and 3 different approaches to this I decided to make my own. It has not been fully tested yet, but once it has I will post the code.

I havn’t released this class yet so don’t go trying it

To give you an idea as to the usage, note dfm is (currently) a 12 line class for convenience only, you could easily work without it.

for f in FormOption.objects.all():
    dfm.add_field(
        f.field_name,
        forms.BooleanField(required=False, label=f.title)
    )

TheForm = dfm.form(_TheForm)

if request.method == 'POST':
    form = TheForm(request.POST)
else:
    form = TheForm()

As you can see, after the first few lines, you go back to your normal Django code. It works with only a few dynamic fields, as well as displays the fields in the order you defined them. That was the main problem at least one of the alternatives I found.

You are also able to create your clean function in the forms to do some basic validation.

Expect this in a few weeks after some more testing has been done.

Internationalization (i18n)

2009-09-27T21:23:27+00:00

Yesterday, I started work on using Django’s i18n to build my first multi-lingual site.

I must say, the initial setup took me quite some time.

A brief overview of the setup

Add the middleware (easy)
Add uggettext everywhere (easy)
UTF-8 some files. If I had thought about this one in advance it really would have decreased my setup time.

I have so far written some middleware and a request context function to make everything that much easier. There is some database stuff left to do, so articles can be available in multiple languages, and possibly support for fallback. I think for now this will be somewhat manual, however in future I do intend on creating a custom model.

Once there has been some testing on this, I will publish some the code, as well as the possibility of a tutorial

Replacing delete, with hidden

2009-08-19T08:55:48+00:00

One fairly common thing on a completed application is the request to hide rows from the database, rather than delete.

Just today I had this problem, and this was solved in just a couple of lines.

These are standard Django functions, nothing custom.

My current model (for example only)

class Category(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100, unique=True)

My new model

class Category(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100, unique=True)
    deleted = models.BooleanField(db_index=True)
    objects = NotDeleted()
    show_all = models.Manager()

What is this NotDeleted?, this is where the magic happens.

class NotDeleted(models.Manager):
    def get_query_set(self):
        return super(NotDeleted, self).get_query_set().filter(deleted=False)

This will automatically append deleted=False to your database query.

If for some reason you need to get deleted items again,

categories = Category.show_all.all()

You could create a separate manager, just to show deleted items as well.

For more information on Django database managers, http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.0/topics/db/managers/#modifying-initial-manager-querysets