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Django Alfresco

I have a wheelhouse and it's integrating Django with a Java Open Source project. Today I get to announce the next one, Django Alfresco. We combined the Alfresco's document management capabilities with Django's web tier components. I get mixed reactions when I tell people about this project. Anywhere from, "Why did you go and mess up a good thing" to "This is amazing." The former more than the latter, but I'm going to try to convince you that it is a really good idea to use this project. Jeff Potts who is the ECM lead at Optaros and got the project to a place where it could be released has a post on it and a screencast.

• at 2:59p.m.
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Django Daemon Command Extension

Recently I started to move Cubby Scott away from a cron and towards a queue. It's hard to be real time when you wake up a cron job once every 3 minutes. Lame. I'm also in the process of adding screenshots and content retrieval. Both take a good amount of time to process. The queue part was easy after reading Rabbits and Warrens and Working with Python and RabbitMQ. The problem came when I started working on the consumer, no one ever talks about the consumer. Well I'm going to give the consumer some love.

• at 9:19p.m.
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Class Based Views and Reusable Apps

One of the major pain points of using reusable apps is modifying the view logic. No matter how many options you can pass into the view function, someone is going to want to do something different with it. I've been using Pinax for a little while now and modifying views is the only thing I don't love about it. Enter class based views. There is currently a ticket out there to make them part of Django 1.2 and there is a great example out on djangosnippets.org. Instead of trying to deal with everything in the url conf you get a class object with functions that you can override. The simple user will not know the difference between the two, while the advanced user can create custom views easily, without repeating logic. Who likes DRY?

• at 11:40a.m.
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A Ride For Two

Yesterday we took the curtains off A Ride for Two which is the wedding website of my brother Brian and his fiancee Christine. There are a number of sites where you can create a wedding website out there, but honestly, where is the fun in that.

• at 7:10p.m.
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Drupy: A Drupal port built on Django.

From the Drupy project home page.

Drupy is a Python port of the Drupal content management system built on Django.

Drupy had previously been a direct PHP-to-Python port of Drupal, but this had proven to be quite unmanageable. Drupy has taken a new direction in which it is being built on top of the Django Framework. This will offer maximum stability and a much more efficient development cycle.

I just have to ask why and cry on the inside. It's sort of like finding out your girlfriend is cheating on you with a mortal enemy.

• at 1:08a.m.
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Django Solr

After writing about a thousand lines of documentation, I'm spent. I'd like to write something witty or clever or fun, but I got nothing.

With some Optaros blessing I released a Django Solr module out into the wild. It was written by Jay Dolan for a top 20 newspaper site about 9 months ago, but had to be rewritten for Django 1.0 and I got side tracked with clients and Alfresco.

• at 10:30p.m.
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Django and robots.txt

In the spirit of SEO, Django and this site I took the next step and added a robots.txt file. Nothing too exciting here, but I saw some postings on how to do it the wrong way that made me sad. Like serving the robots.txt file via Django. Why are you adding the overhead of django/mod_python to serve a static file?

• at 2:27p.m.
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Django Sitemaps and a Better ping_google Function

In an effort to play around with the sitemaps contrib package I decided to add a sitemap to this website. It's pretty intuitive and easy, so there is really no excuse not to put a sitemap on your site. It's about 15 minutes worth of effort and 2 changes. The effort comes when you don't want to ignore every search engine other than Google. Let's start by adding a sitemap then we'll show how to ping Yahoo and Ask as well.

• at 11:22a.m.
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Enterprise Django: Django on Jython

Enterprises like Java. It's safe. No one has ever been fired for suggesting Java. More and more I think the industry as a whole is realizing that Java doesn't work for rapid development. (Groovy on Grails excluded)

So how do you convince a (insert large Java shop here) to take a flyer on one of them there newfangled web frameworks? Well tell them we can run it in a JVM of course.

• at 10:22p.m.
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Assembling Django Applications into Web 2.0 Solutions

Django development is fast. Every site is different and there will always be a need for some custom development. Django was designed for a news room with deadlines, where new modules or features would have to be added in days not weeks. To illustrate, Django Dash challenges teams of 2 to build a site in 48 hours. Some of the results are impressive given the time constraints.

• at 10:17p.m.
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