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Measuring the Django Community: The Django community in 2012
Jacob writes about the size of the Django community in 2012. It’s pretty amazing how the little framework built in Lawrence, KS by some of the best friends and co-workers I’ve ever had has exploded in the past few years. I remember vividly being in that basement in Lawrence when Google announced App Engine and we all sat, dumbfounded and beaming with pride that it was based on Django. Later, we all were so stoked when Pownce launched on Django, because we felt like there was finally a big “app” (versus “site”) that ran on Django. Today, as Jacob writes, “the high-profile uses of Django read like a Who’s Who of the Internet. Check this list out: AMD, Canonical, Discovery, Disqus, HP, IBM, Instagram, Intel, Lexis-Nexis, the Library of Congress, Mozilla, NASA, National Geographic, the New York Times, Orbitz, PBS, Pinterest, Rdio, VMWare, Walt Disney, and the Washington Post. Not bad for a few nerds hacking in a basement in Lawrence, Kansas, eh?” Not bad at all. Those days in the basement were special, indeed.
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PYBB: Django-based forum software
Nice. A full-featured vBulletin-alike for Python/Django. Although there are some interesting and more modern takes on discussions, sometimes you just need the classic-style forum. Looks well-documented and tested.
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How I Learnt enough Python/Django to be Dangerous in One Month
Nice piece describing the process one person took to understanding the basic of Python and Django.
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Magic
When I first joined the team that built Django, back in late 2005, they were hard at work doing something they called “Magic Removal.” Apparently, Django’s first few iterations had been way too magical, and it had now been deemed desirable to break down the illusions and make it very obvious how everything was being done.
This seemed absurd to me. In my very limited understanding of Django at the time, I totally agreed—it was magic. It made things that I’d previously never been able to do not only possible, but so easy and—dare I say—fun. I couldn’t understand why anyone could possibly want to remove that magic.
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Go ’head, Mr. Lendle
About a month ago, I got a call from Brian Ford, who happens to be my cousin. Brian’s wife, Carolyn, had come up with an idea and Brian wanted my thoughts. Amazon had recently rolled out a new feature that allows users to lend Kindle books to others using their e-mail address. This, in effect, means you can really only lend books to people you know (because you probably don’t know many stranger’s e-mail addresses). Carolyn’s idea was simple: what if there were a site that could hook you up with a stranger that has the book you want, so they can lend it to you?
Although I owned exactly zero Kindle books and in the past five years have literally written more books than I’ve read, it sounded like a pretty great idea, and I was interested in building it. The first thing I did was call up my homeboy Nathan Borror, whom I trust implicitly on all things, but especially all things web and all things books. Nathan runs social book site Readernaut, and I figured he’d be able to help me understand the ins and outs of how a service like this might work, and he’d probably also know if something similar was already out. Nathan dug the idea and said wasn’t aware of anyone else already doing it. I was sold. That same night, I dug into Amazon’s Product Advertising API to see if I could make this thing happen.
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Tracking changes to fields in Django
David Cramer shows off the clever solution they use at Disqus for tracking changes to fields on Django model instances.
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Django Advent - Messages for the rest of us
My article on Django Advent, covering the new messages framework for Django 1.2.
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Presentation: pip and virtualenv | mathematism
Great resource.
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django-registration-facebook-backend
Exactly what it says on the box — a Facebook Connect backend for django-registration — and it looks well done, to boot.
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MichaelMoore.com, now powered by Django
Just a kinda cool big-name site that recently switched to Django.
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django-filter
Alex’s django-filter looks pretty badass. Coulda used this while building 97 Bottles!
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django-sorting
Not sure how I never saw this before, but it looks like something I can make great use of. It’s inspired by django-pagination, and works pretty much the same way, but for sorting, instead.
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django-lean: A-B Testing for Django
Very cool-looking A-B testing framework for Django. Would love to play with this, but it has some pretty ridiculous dependencies, such as South (which I don’t use). Would love to see something like this that was a bit more generic and didn’t require so much.
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Django Dose
A nice new Django community site by Kevin Fricovsky, Alex Gaynor, Brian Rosner, and Eric Florenzano. Good stuff!
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Xian’s django_compressor
I’ve tried pretty much all of the Django CSS and/or JSS compression apps, and Christian Metts’ django_compressor looks like the winner to me. Why? Mostly because it doesn’t make me list all my CSS/JS files in my settings — it just reads it straight from the
Visitlinkandscripttags in my HTML templates. This is how it should be. Well-done, Xian! -
django-gatekeeper
Generic moderation of Django model instances. Very cool — great idea.
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django-shorturls
Borrowing code from Simon Willison, Jacob Kaplan-Moss has written up a proper reusable Django app for hosting your own short URLs (which is way more future-proof than using most of the URL shortening services out there). I may have to tack this on to 97, as well as our upcoming app…
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Christian Metts’ django_inlines
Nathan Borror, myself, and probably others have built “inlines” functionality for Django apps in the past (and to give credit where it’s due, the idea originally came from http://ellingtoncms.com), but Christian appears to have won this round. His new django_inlines is the most thorough, most Pythonic, most robust, and most flexible solution I’ve seen yet. I’m definitely using this next time I need inlines. On the flip side, it is a bit more complicated to get set up than the solutions Nathan and I came up with — but if you’re used to dealing with Django apps, you’ll won’t have a problem.
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A Detailed Django Tutorial: Blog Basics Part I
Part one of what looks like it will be a very detailed a through “building your first Django app” tutorial. Nice.
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django-lfs (Lightning Fast Shop)
I haven’t had a chance to play with this, but I’m glad to see it out there. Satchmo, the de facto Django ecommerce solution, is terrific, but it’s also pretty large, complicated, and overkill for many sites. It’s nice to have a simple solution, as well.
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Jacob Kaplan-Moss: It’s time for a change
My buddies Jacob and Frank Wiles have started a new kind of Django company: they’re focusing on supporting and maintaining your apps after you’ve written them. We all know Django makes writing apps very easy, but if you have some success, you might find yourself stuck on scaling, optimization, obscure bugs, and the like. Jacob and Frank want to be your go-to experts on these issues. Good idea.
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Django snippets: Smart {% if %} template tag
A terrific drop-in replacement for Django’s built-in {% if %} tag, this one includes logical operator support. I have a series of filters I use for logical operators in Django templates and while it works well, I think this approach is better. Plus, it’s 100% backwards-compatible with the built-in {% if %} tag, so it’s really easy to get started using it. Nice.
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Josh Works: Worksology
The talented Josh Works has redesigned his personal site with a great mid-century style. He also used my Savoy as the basis for the site’s backend, so it’s another example of what Savoy can do. Check it out!
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Django snippets: Hide Emails
Useful snippet from Brent O’Connor: obscures e-mail addresses in your content (by using JavaScript to render a link which contains the email encoded in a random string of hex digit or decimal digits). Nice.
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World Online seeks Web Designer
The World Company in Lawrence, KS is looking for a web designer. This is where I worked before Blue Flavor, and also the place where Django was created. It’s a great place to work, full of interesting people, in a cool town. Check it out!
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django-haystack
Daniel Lindsley’s search app for Django looks wonderful. The API is perfect, and feels very “Django.” It matches up very closely with how the admin APIs work, so it feels great. Currently has support for about five different search engine backends. I wonder if there’s a chance it will eventually support regular SQL backends, as well? One of the things I liked about djangosearch was that the same app could handle simple SQL backends and something like solr when I needed it. Good-looking stuff, here. Excited to try it out.
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Django 1.1 alpha 1 released
! New features include SQL aggregation, query expressions, testing performance improvements, and more.
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Malcolm: Some Simple Django Debugging Tools
Malcolm drops some debugging knowledge on your ass. Good stuff.
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django-ratings
Good, flexible-looking Django ratings app by David Cramer. Might have used this for 97bottles.com if it’d been available at that time.
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django-paypall
Looks like a pretty sweet PayPal integration app for Django.
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django-tracking
Useful-looking pluggable Django app for visitor tracking. Keeps tracks of visitors to your site, the ages they view, their IP address, their user agent, etc. Simple stuff, but this appears to be a very clean implementation. I wonder if something like this should be included with Django as part of
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Jounce, the online home of M. Jacskon Wilkinson
Jackson’s new site is not only beautiful, it’s powered by my Django-based CMS, Savoy. Jackson’s been beta testing. Check it out!
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NYTimes: Represent
Cool new app from The New York Times that lets New Yorkers keep tabs on what their elected officials are doing. It’s built on GeoDjango. Nice to see Django continue its massive penetration into the news and journalism worlds.
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Integrating Facebook Connect with Django in 15 minutes
Niiiiiice. I hate to say it, but OpenID may be dead.
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Django snippets: Django template object jsonify
Simple, but very useful Django template tag.
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Lisa Simpson: crossword fan and … Django developer?
Funny. Nice catch, Leah. :)
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python-markdown2
Pointed out to me by Josh Works, this newer version of Markdown for Python is faster, cleaner, more complete, and API-compatible with the pervious version. In a 10-minute play-with session, it feels noticeably faster, with no apparent negative side effect. w00t!
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Django snippets: PyIf Template Tag
Nice replacement
Visitiftag for Django templates which supports a lot more types of conditionals. It sounds like the author aims for this to go into Django proper and replace the built-iniftag. My personal opinion is that would not be a good idea; there are very sound reasons why Django’siftag is as simplistic as it is. But, if you need something more robust and powerful, give this a shot. It looks nice. -
Django URL template tag follow-up
After reading the comments on my last post, about my beefs with Django’s URL template tag, it sounds like I made an assumption that was incorrect: I had understood that the
{% url %}tag is now considered a best practice, and using theget_asbsolute_urlmethod in templates is now considered a less-than-best practice.Turns out, most people agree with me that
Moreget_absolute_urlis still a very valid method of getting the URL for an object’s detail page for use in templates. Sounds like most people are now doing the same thing I do, which is to use the{% url %}tag when it makes sense (for pages not associated with an object, or for views with few or no arguments), and to useget_absolute_urlfor object detail pages -
django-schedule
This looks like an absolutely fabulous reusable Django app for events and scheduling. I’ve never been too happy with the events piece of Savoy, so I could easily see it getting replaced with this. Be sure to check out Tony Hauber’s great blog post about it, too.
Django projects become more plug-and-play everyday. So exciting.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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