This Week in Django 36

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

This week we have James Bennett on the program discussing his book, the blog, speaking, and a whole lot more. We also discuss 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

Show Notes

Big News (1:40)

• New Comments Lands in Trunk (8557) – New Comments was just merged into trunk. So glad this one made it in time. Good work Thejaswi Puthraya (theju). It was his Google Summer of Code project. Also thanks goes to Jannis Leidel his mentor.
  • Upgrade Guide
  • Backwards Incompatible Change

• Django Beta 2 Released – another important step in the push to Django 1.0.
  • Release Notes

• Official Django 1.0 Release Party Announced – dinner party at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday, September 6th at 7pm. Coincides with DjangoCon, but all are invited to attend.

Interview – James Bennett (9:05)

James Bennett works for The World Online, the birthplace of Django, where he helps to develop Ellington, a content management system for news companies that is written in Django. He is also the Release Manager for the Django project, and an occasional contributor of code and documentation. He’s written the very popular book, Practical Django Projects for Apress and he is the man behind the always interesting blog The B-List.

• Links
  • The B-List Blog
  • Ellington
  • How the news breaks – excellent post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on the news process with election results. It’s very innovative.
  • Google Code Projects
  • Practical Django Projects
  • Let’s talk about documentation

Tracking Trunk (1:19:36)

• X-View Middleware is removed from defaults (8537) – apparently just used for the docs and causing some confusion.

• Fixed timesince filter to handle timezone-aware times (8579)

• Removed oldforms, validators, and related code (8616)

• ModelForms made more like Forms (8618)

Community Catchup (1:28:55)

• Creating a Basic API with Django

• Django Nashville – if you’re in the Nashville area there’s a new Google Group and plans for a meetup. We encourage you to head on over and add your name to the list.

• Debugging Django Screencasts – Eric Holscher is planning a series of 5 – 7 screencasts that focus on debugging approaches with Django. It’s an excellent series so far and I’m looking for a lot more from Eric.
  • Screencast: Debugging with the Django Error Page
  • Screencast 2: Logging in Django, for fun and profit
  • Using pdb, the Python Debugger

• Using Akismet with Django’s New Comments Framework – Great post on getting Akismet going with the newly landed comments framework. Be sure to read the comments on this one.

• django-monetize – django-monetize is a pluggable Django app which aims to make it trivial to intelligently monetize your Django projects. So far, django-monetize has built in support for Amazon Affiliates’ Custom Links, Amazon Affiliates’ Omakase, Amazon Affiliates’ Search Links, Amazon Honor System donations, Dreamhost referrals, Google Adsense ad units, Paypal donations, and SliceHost referrals.

• Satchmo trunk stabelizes with Django trunk Bruce Kroeze just checked in updates to Satchmo trunk which now means
  Satchmo-trunk (rev 1469 or higher) should jive with Django trunk (rev 8761 or higher).
  Please note the Backwards incompatible changes here – with these changes, Satchmo should be done with the last of the major incompatibility changes between Django and Satchmo.
  • Satchmo Developers on TWiD 31

Tip of the Week (1:40:51)

In my twitter last week I mentioned that I was frustrated by the lack of a first() method on the QuerySet so I just added one. I had a couple of people ask me how I did that. Well Django has this idea of Custom Managers that you can create for your models. I generally put this in its own managers.py module but you can put it anywhere.

from django.db import models

class PostManager(models.Manager):

    def first(self):

        return self.get_query_set()0

Once this is in place you need to add a line that indicates that you’ll be using your custom manager in place of the default one:

    objects = managers.PostManager()

This technique is also featured on Page 160 in Practical Django Projects. James uses the approach to wrap up some complex extra() query so it’s simply accessible from the view. It’s a great approach and something you should try to do whenever possible.

• jQuery style chaining with the Django ORM

Thank You! (1:45:04)

• Lots of Vim goodness
  • Hacker Public Radio – VIM is my IDE – Jonas Rullo on his Hacker Public Radio podcast makes mention of This Week in Django and talks about his VIM setup.
  • Vim Screencast: Selections – Justin Lilly screencast on using visual mode for selections.
  • Vim Screencast: % Operator – Justin Lilly screencast on using the % operator in VIM.

• Running Time: 1:48:59
• Download: AAC, MP3, OGG