Living on the Edge

This Week in Django 36 - 2008-08-31

Posted on September 03, 2008

This Week in Django 36 has been posted. It’s a great episode with our special guest James Bennett. Hear James talk about the book, the blog, speaking, and a whole lot more.

This Week in Django 35 - 2008-08-24

Posted on August 26, 2008

This Week in Django 35 has been posted. Don’t miss it. We catch up with Robert Lofthouse, Chairman of DjangoCon and EuroDjangoCon.

This Week in Django 34 - 2008-08-17

Posted on August 18, 2008

This Week in Django 34 has been posted.

This week we discuss Django 1.0 Beta 1, a bunch of source commits, some cool projects from the community, and a tip of the week.

This Week in Django 33 - 2008-08-10

Posted on August 14, 2008

This Week in Django 33 has been posted.

This week we discuss the NEW This Week in Django site, a bunch of source commits, and some cool projects from the community.

All show notes from now on will be on the new This Week in Django dedicated site.

This Week in Django 31 - 2008-07-27

Posted on July 29, 2008

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

This week we discuss Satchmo, the Django open-source E-Commerce application with Chris Moffitt and Bruce Kroeze. We also look at a few source commits and some cool projects from the community.

Apologies for some of the microphone noise.

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (89.3 MB, 1:52:43, AAC)

MP3 Edition (77.4 MB, 1:52:43, MP3)

OGG Edition (63.3 MB, 1:52:43, 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.

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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

Big News (0:00)

Interview – Satchmo Developers (8:33)

Satchmo is a Django based E-Commerce solution.

Tracking Trunk (1:02:46)

Community Catchup (1:08:41)

  • Semantic Django – David Larlet’s website where he archives a collection of open source semantic reusable django apps including such technologies as OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, RDF, FOAF, REST, Atom, Snippets and Patchs.
  • Automating tests in Django – Great post by Eric Holscher that goes through how to create integration tests for your Django applications in an automated way through the use of a Middleware that logs the test creation output to a file.
    • Automating Test Creation – Empty’s feedback on it.
    • Testmaker .002 – Eric updates us with new additions to his open source test project including adding a management command, making it simple to add TestMaker to your project just but adding a reference to INSTALLED_APPS.
  • Django Subdomains – Every have the requirement to implement customized subdomains in your django app, mapping to a model key? It makes for clean, personal, simple to remember url (ex. username.yourappname.com). If you’ve ever used the popular Basecamp web application you’re familiar with their URL structure – [companyname].projectpath.com. This tutorials details how you can do the same as well as references other posts who attempted the same thing, and issues they all ran into along the way.
  • Creator/updater fields for admin – Peter Baumgartner, LincolnLoop, recently got his hands dirty customizing a newforms-admin implementation and created a a customized ModelAdmin class that sets fields for models saved in admin corresponding to the user that created the object and the user that last updated the object. Seems trivial for the currently edited model but the catalyst for this was making sure inlines received the same auditing synchronization. He also leverage JQuery to provide additional client side logic.

Thank You! (1:46:38)

  • NERD_Tree – Excellent VIM plugin that gives a project drawer like behavior.

This Week in Django 30 - 2008-07-20

Posted on July 21, 2008

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

This week we discuss the NewForms-Admin merge into Trunk, DjangoCon, 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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (41.8 MB, 49:31, AAC)

MP3 Edition (34.1 MB, 49:31, MP3)

OGG Edition (27.9 MB, 49:31, 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

Big News (0:47)

Tracking Trunk (15:04)

Community Catchup (26:16)

  • Kevin Fricovsky – joins the This Week in Django team as Community Evangelist. Kevin will be working to produce the show, contacting guests, gathering news items, coming up with ideas. Kevin has been doing this work regularly anyway so it’s great of him to team up with us to help out the program:
  • PyOhio – Reminder that this free one day conference is in Columbus, OH on July 26, 2008.
  • Twitter Search – via Kevin Fricovsky using the new Twitter Search capability to track all tweets about django.

Tip of the Week (38:32)

This tip comes to us via Ben Jao Ming in his post Django auto-translation of field values.

If you need to translate content in a field then gettext is not going to help you out. Since you can create your own custom fields it’s easy to wrap a CharField with the translation behavior:


from django.db import models
from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _

class AutoTranslateField(models.CharField):
    __metaclass__ = models.SubfieldBase
    def to_python(self, value):
        return str(_(value))

Just add whatever translations you know of to the locale file and run compilemessages.

Thank You! (42:45)

This Week in Django 29 - 2008-07-13

Posted on July 15, 2008

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (74.2 MB, 1:31:20, AAC)

MP3 Edition (62.8 MB, 1:31:20, MP3)

OGG Edition (51.5 MB, 1:31:20, 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

Big News (3:38)

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

Tracking Trunk (14:27)

Branching and Merging (34:18)

Community Catchup (47:27)

  • 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

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.

Thank You! (1:23:24)

  • Kevin Fricovsky

Two New Great Books

Posted on July 12, 2008
There seems to be a plethora of Python related books coming out these days. I just stumbled across two interesting ones. First up is Essential SQLAlchemy. I desperately want this book but I’m tired of paper books. It’s available on Safari Online, but I don’t have that. I’d really like to see a Kindle version. I’ll probably end up buying the paper, because it looks to be very exciting.
Secondly is The Definitive Guide to Pylons. This book is offered as a free beta book, but will also be available for purchase through Apress. I’ve skimmed the contents but plan to spend some time with it in the coming week. I’m really interested in the Deployment chapter, so I’ll probably start there first.

No TWiD This Week

Posted on July 07, 2008

Apologies to all but there will be no This Week in Django podcast this week. Enjoy the week off and we look forward to seeing you all next week on TWiD Live.

This Week in Django 28 - 2008-06-30

Posted on July 01, 2008

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

This week we talk about quite a few source commits (kicking-ass), some cool projects from the community, the Tip of the Week, and a question from the IRC.

Let us know if downloads are better for those of you in Europe.

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (50.3 MB, 1:01:06, AAC)

MP3 Edition (42 MB, 1:01:06, MP3)

OGG Edition (32.9 MB, 1:01:06, 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

Big News

Malcolm Tredinnick is back!!!

Tracking Trunk (1:08)

Community Catchup (19:28)

  • Kss in DjangoKSS is a javascript framework that aims to allow Ajax development without javascript. It uses stylesheets with CSS-compliant syntax to setup behaviours in the client and a set of well-defined commands that are marshalled back from the server to manipulate the DOM.

Tip of the Week (43:49)

Ever need to reorder the fields on your Model Form?


class TranslationForm(BookForm):
    translator = forms.CharField(max_length=40)

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(TranslationForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.fields.keyOrder = ['title', 'author', 'translator', 'publisher', 'copyright']

IRC Ad Nauseam (47:10)

Django IRC FAQ

Backwards Incompatible Changes Information

Charlie O’Keefe say, “I’ve gotten into designing restful URL schemes, basically organizing a web app around resources. Learning Django I was frustrated to find that nothing seems to be done this way. Is there any tool that can help with that?”

Thank You! (50:58)

This Week in Django 27 - 2008-06-22

Posted on June 23, 2008

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.

Tracking Trunk (5:02)

Branching and Merging (9:50)

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™.

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.

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.

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})

Thank You!

This Week in Django 26 - 2008-06-16

Posted on June 17, 2008

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

This week we talk about the Django 1.0 Roadmap, EuroPython Sprint, tons of source commits, great stuff happening in the NewForms-Admin branch, 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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (32.4 MB, 55:28, AAC)

MP3 Edition (38.1 MB, 55:28, MP3)

OGG Edition (30.8 MB, 55:28, 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

Big News (1:37)

EuroPython Django Sprint – We are holding an official Django sprint, July 10th until saturday July 12th, during the EuroPython conference. Join us in the push to 1.0.

Tracking Trunk (9:19)

  • Fixed serialization for multi-model inheritance (7600)
    • Serializers were including all superclass fields in their output. Now only local fields are included.
    • Implicit OneToOne? primary keys were not correctly added to the metamodel, so they were always marked to be serialized, even though they were primary
    • Model saving was too aggressive about creating new parent class instances during deserialization. Raw save on a model now skips saving of the parent class.

Branching and Merging (17:06)

Community Catchup (29:58)

  • Django Dash Results – Congratulations to all the participants. Check the results for information on all the winners.
    • 1st Place – Benjamin Pollack and Tyler Hicks-Wright – Their site was a code review site with Mercurial integration.
    • 2nd Place – Eric Florenzano and Tony HauberFeedalizer is a syndication feed aggregation based on popular feeds ranked by users.
    • 3rd Place – Justin Lilly and Jannis Leidel – A site connecting developers & translators with rankings for translators and groupings.
  • A Better Serialization Framework – A series of interesting posts by fiam on creating what he calls a better serialization framework.

Tip of the Week (41:59)

If you have a template tag that you want to automatically load into context for all of your templates, you can take the same approach Django does with the built-in template tags.

This must be done early on in the load process, so in your __init__.py for the app or project, just do:


from django.template import add_to_builtins
add_to_builtins('template_utils.templatetags.generic_content')

Thank You! (44:56)

  • Code Swarm – Python – amazing swarm representation of Python code commits over years of time. You have to see this!

This Week in Django 25 - 2008-06-08

Posted on June 09, 2008

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

This week we talk about a few source commits, a discussion about releases, Some cool projects from the community, and the Tip of the Week.

We liked this one so much we decided to record it twice!

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (42.9 MB, 52:57, AAC)

MP3 Edition (36.4 MB, 52:57, MP3)

OGG Edition (28.3 MB, 52:57, 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

Tracking Trunk (4:05)

Community Catchup (15:58)

  • Django India – Google Group discussion for Django developers in India.
  • django-arcade – a Django pluggable app that gets a constantly updating list of flash games and swf files every day that you can include with a template tag into any project you want.

Tip of the Week (44:00)

Onno Timmerman sends us this tip with doing Internationalization.

I needed to give someone a django.po file. Normaly a user wants to edit it with Microsoft Word, even when you ask not to they tend to do it! Poedit is a great program that makes it easy to edit these files.

Poedit

Thank You! (45:39)

Intermediate Models – Ticket 6095 – Worked on by Eric Florenzano

Brian Rosner

Junk in the Trunk by Campfire Dusty Rootin’ Tootin’ Sing-A-Longs & Campfire Ditties

This Week in Django 24 - 2008-06-01

Posted on June 02, 2008

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

This week Eric Florenzano fills in while Michael is out. We talk to James Tauber about who he is and what Pinax is. A few trunk changes and some community bits.

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

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (32.7 MB, 44:47, AAC)

MP3 Edition (41.7 MB, 44:47, MP3)

OGG Edition (53.7 MB, 44:47, Vorbis)

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

Quick note, Brian Rosner did the audio in Michael’s absence. Its not as good as what Michael produces, but he is getting better with it :)

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

Big News (0:25)

We’re back! Apologizes for last week’s cancellation. Michael’s wife gave birth to their 2nd child, Lucas Matthew Trier. Welcome to the world, Lucas!

James Tauber Interview (1:12)

  • James is the CTO at US-based startup mValent.
    • Tell us a little about mValent? Is Django involved?
  • How did you come to find and use Django?

Tracking Trunk (31:51)

Community Catchup (35:09)

  • sleepy-django – Sleepy, allows you to create a static site by rendering Django templates to HTML.

Thank You! (39:08)

  • Special thanks to Brian Rosner for handling the show production this week. You did an awesome job man.

This Week in Django - Cancelled

Posted on May 26, 2008

Due to the Memorial Day Weekend and the lack of any pressing news, we’ve decided to cancel the show this week. Brian Rosner and I hope you all have an opportunity to spend time with family and friends. We’ll be doing the same.