Empty Thoughts

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

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.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

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The Enhanced Podcast version contains screenshots and easy access links to all of the items we discuss throughout the podcast.

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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 (3:38)

• EuroPython 2008 has come and gone.
  • EuroPython Talk Materials

• DjangoCon – Jacob Kaplan-Moss let the cat out of the bag and let us know that a DjangoCon is being planned for the 1.0 release timeframe for September 6th and 7th. More details to follow. We’ll keep you posted.
  • Official Announcement
  • A Quote from Robert Lofthouse via Simon Willison’s blog.

“DjangoCon 2008. Venue: Googleplex, San Francisco Bay Area. Dates: 6th and 7th Sept. Official post will be on djangoproject.com soon.”

• Callcast – Jacob Kaplan-Moss and DjangoCon 2008

Tracking Trunk (14:27)

• Added a ping_google management command to the sitemaps contrib (7813) – Makes it easy to ping Google once your Sitemap is up and running.

• Fixed #2070: refactored Django’s file upload capabilities. (7814)
  • Django now handles large files nicely in uploads with the new streaming file upload handling.
  • New uploading documentation
  • There have been a ton of fixes since this landed.
  • Multi-part MIME parsing fix (7905)
  • Support pluggable backends for FileField (5361)

• Moved make-messages, compile-messages and daily-cleanup into django-admin.py (7844) – This makes them easily accessible as management commands and reduces the number of binaries and man pages.
  • django-command-extensions – This is a repository for collecting global custom management extensions.
  • Jannis Leidel -

• Rolled QuerySetPaginator into the Paginator class, to simplify things. QuerySetPaginator still exists as an alias, for backwards compatibility. (7865)

Branching and Merging (34:18)

• Added autodiscover functionality to django.contrib.admin. (7872)
  • This makes the admin aware of per-app admin.py modules and does an import on them when explicitly called.

• Added some documentation about media defintions in ModelAdmin classes. (7873)
  • Subtle backward incompatible change

• Learning NewForms-Admin
  • NewForms-Admin Wiki
  • NewForms-Admin HowTo Wiki
  • Django Screencasts 7 – NewForms Admin I

Community Catchup (47:27)

• How to build Django web apps – Looks to be a great workshop with one of Django’s superstars, Jeff Croft.

• How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000

• django-treemenus – Very cool application by Julien Phalip that makes it easy to add tree menus to your Django app and manage the structure dynamically from the customized admin interface. View the 0.4 release post for more information.

• First Two Django Screencasts – Eric Florenzano never sleeps. His first foray into screencasts are quite impressive. He covers: 1. Setting up a Django Environment 2. Using Django-Pagination

• Interview with Jacob Kaplan-Moss – Great interview by Brazilian Marinho Brandão.

• Yahoo’s Build your Own Search Service in Django – Will Larson offers two informative articles on integrating BOSS with Django.
  • Polishing Up Our Django & BOSS Search Service

Tip of the Week (1:10:41)

Mike Axiak offers the following tip for getting started with contributing to Django source code.

1. Find a closed ticket that interests you. 2. Take a look at a closed ticket, but not the patch. 3. Check out the revision prior to the one that closed the ticket. 4. Write a patch for Django with your own implementation. 5. Compare your patch with the committed patch and try to learn from the differences.

Once you’re comfortable do it for real.

• Framework and tests to check for the correct operation of django-admin and manage.py

Thank You! (1:23:24)

• Django-Chunks – Simple keyed content that you can insert into your templates.
• Cloud27 – A social network built on Pinax.
• This Week in Django 24 – Interview with Pinax / Cloud27 founder James Tauber.
• Django-Hotclub Channel

• Kevin Fricovsky
  • How I Work Daily
  • Django-NYC – Discussion group for Django-NYC attendees. If you’re in the NY area, be sure to check it out.

• Brian Rosner
  • Brian Rosner Blog
  • Brian on Twitter
  • TWiD Live

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

This week we talk about the Django Software Foundation, some source commits, some cool projects from the community, a Tip of the Week. and a couple IRC items. It’s a packed show.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (55.8 MB, 1:08:08, AAC)

MP3 Edition (46.8 MB, 1:08:08, MP3)

OGG Edition (38.5 MB, 1:08:08, 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

SPONSOR: This Week in Django is brought you by Justin Lilly, who according to all historic accounts, once scissor kicked Angela Landsbury. Thank you Justin.

Big News (2:18)

New foundation for Django – Lawrence-Journal World announces new Django foundation and code commits change license ownership.

• Jacob Kaplan-Moss Signing Papers – History in the making.

Tracking Trunk (5:02)

• login view no longer assumes that set_test_cookie has been called. (7692)
  • This is mildly backwards-incompatible, but in the “now it works the way it should have all along” sense.

• Added a—traceback option to syncdb to provide a stack trace when custom SQL loading fails. Also added documentation for the—traceback option (7704)

• Fixed bug with Model.delete() which did not always delete objects in the right order. (7722)

Branching and Merging (9:50)

• Handle multiple e-mail addresses when checking if it was mistakenly entered. Also prevent e-mail guessing by checking password before throwing an error. (7694)

Community Catchup (15:57)

• DebugFooter Redux – Last week we talked about Andreas Marr very cool Django Snippet to add debug information into the footer of each webpage. This week he did it one better based on some suggestions from our program. Now that’s what I call Podcast Driven Development™.
  • django-loggin

• Django Tutorial – Abstract Base Classes vs Model Table Inheritance – Awesome post by Kevin Fricovsky that covers the difference between Abstract Base Classes and Multi-Table Inheritance.

• django_templatecomponents – A django application by Filip Noetzel that makes it easy organize your component source (javascript, css) right in your django templates to to make your website much faster.
  • Git Repository

• group_required Decorator – Matt Dennebaum offers a nice addition to your Django projects that adds the ability to check for authorization of a user against the specified group.

• django-ajax-validation – A reusable application by Alex Gaynor for doing ajax validation with django newforms. It requires jQuery.
  • Git repository also available
  • Ticket 2070 – Streaming file uploading by Mike Axiak.

• Fun with queryset-refactor – Another great post by James Bennett discussing some of the new features that were part of the Queryset-Refactor merge.
  • Practical Django Projects – Forthcoming book by James Bennett.

• Werkzeug Debugger in Django – The Werkzeug debugger has a kick ass AJAX based console option to debug traceback items in the web browser.
  • Changeset 7537
  • Ticket 3527 – Adds Werkzeug to Django directly.

• Let’s talk about documentation – Excellent post by James Bennett on how he approaches documentation for his Django projects.

Tip of the Week (43:22)

This tip comes from Alexander Solovyov in his blog post Render To Improved.

Sometimes you want to return a RequestContext from a view. One way to do that is to specify the response code using a decorator.

@render_to('mytemplate.html')
def myview(request):
  return ({'id': 1, 'name':'empty'})

# example with override
@render_to('mytemplate.html')
def myview(request):
  return ({'name':'empty'}, 'override.html')

# python 2.3 example with override
def myview(request):
  return ({'name':'empty'}, 'override.html')
myview = render_to(myview, 'mytemplate.html')

You can also return a tuple where the second item is a string that overrides the default template specified in render_to.

• Permalink Decorator – “A backwards remapper hulu-hooping dancer, thingy.”—brosner

IRC Ad Nauseam (51:11)

Django IRC FAQ

Backwards Incompatible Changes Information

What’s the difference between Abstract Base Classes and Multi-Table Inheritance?

Abstract Base Classes are where you provide a base class, like Person, and then a derived class like Employee. Django will create a single database table for the Person model that contains the combined fields from both the base and derived classes.

Multi-Table Inheritance also has the base and derived class but at the database level you end up with two tables: one for the base class and one for the derived class, with a one-to-one field added in to connect the two.

Again, we highly recommend the excellent post by Kevin Fricovsky that we mentioned in Community Catchup. Plus, as always, the excellent Django documentation.

• Abstract Base Classes – Django documentation on the subject.

• Multi-Table Inheritance – Django documentation on the subject.

Is there a way to pass the filter arguments as string to the QuerySet?

QuerySet parameters are standard Python keyword arguments, and can use standard keyword argument expansion.

Post.objects.filter(datetime__year=2008)

Post.objects.filter(**{'datetime__year': 2008})

• Dynamic Functions – Excellent post by Marty Alchin that discusses keyword arguments in a very easy to understand way.

Thank You!

• Facestat scales fast for Yahoo traffic
  • Scaling Fast by Lukas Biewald

• Eric Florenzano in Japan – Follow him in his travels. Lots of very cool pictures.

• Brian Rosner
  • Brian Rosner Blog
  • Brian on Twitter
  • TWiD Live

• Michael on Twitter