This Week in Django 32

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

This week we have a very special guest, Justin Bronn, creator of GeoDjango the GIS branch of Django. 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

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Show Notes

Big News (0:48)

• DjangoCon tickets have come and go. If you didn’t get yours sign up for the waiting list.
  • Robert Lofthouse announces waiting list

• Version 1.0
  • Beta 1 scheduled to drop on 8/5/08.
  • Push to Beta 2 sprint – Friday August 8, 2008 in Lawrence, KS and on IRC (#django-sprint).
  • Django Sprint in Berlin

Interview – Justin Bronn (5:11)

Justin Bronn is a computer scientist and third-year law student at the University of Houston who enjoys studying legal topics related to intellectual property and spatial law. Prior to creating GeoDjango, Justin worked as a patent engineer for an intellectual property boutique in Houston and developed scientific data analysis applications for the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

CartoAnalytics is Justin Bronn’s consulting company. CartoAnalytics provides innovative solutions to harness the power of your geospatial data.

• Getting started with GeoDjango
  • GeoDjango Site
  • GeoDjango Wiki
  • GeoDjango Docs
  • GeoDjango: Web Applications for Geographers with Deadlines – Video of presentation From O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Burlingame, CA, May 14, 2008.
  • GeoDjango Presentation at FOSS4G2007
  • An IRC channel is available – join #geodjango on freenode.

• Other items mentioned
  • Houston Crime Maps – excellent reference application for GeoDjango.
  • The limited_related admin plugin.
  • Take Control of Your Maps – Excellent article by Paul Smith on using OpenLayers

• Open source geospatial libraries:
  • GDAL
  • GEOS
  • PostGIS
  • OpenLayers
  • Mapnik

• Data sources
  • OSGeo blog aggregate
  • Census Bureau TIGER/Line Shapefile page

Tracking Trunk (39:51)

• Addition of Intermediate Models (8136) – Excellent addition by Eric Forenzano and Russell Keith-Magee that allows you to add join models with extra attributes.
  • Django Model Documentation
  • Django Admin Documentation
  • Intermediary Models and PyMag – Blog post by Eric Florenzano discussing intermediary models.
• Implemented a secure password reset form (8162) – It uses a token and prompts user for new password, plus also adds base36 encoding and decoding.

• Ensure custom primary keys are shown on the formset (8179)

• Removed several deprecated features for 1.0 (8191) – Removes:
  • “simple” cache backend
  • ObjectPaginator
  • edit_inline_type argument for ForeignKey fields
  • QOperator, QNot, QAnd and QOr
  • maxlength argument

Community Catchup (48:10)

• django-command-extensions becomes django-extensions – We’re renaming the project and the import point from extensions to django_extensions. This will happen in one week.

• Admin Image Widget Pete Baumgartner, LincolnLoop, posted this nice snippet that displays an image instead of a file path if the current file is an image. If you read the comments, another user updated the code generating the thumbnails to use the popular django open source project sorl-thumbnail

• How Django is good for SEO Patrick Beeson is a project manager for E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, TN. In the past Patrick has published a few good django related posts but this was is of interest because it discussed one of the many “out of the box” application benefits the django toolset provides.

• django-assets – Asset management for Django. Automatically compresses javascript files. Supports the following filters: jsmin, jspacker, csstidy, cssutils, yui_js, yui_css, gzip, cssrewrite.

• Translating Django apps. Good practices – Great rundown by Marc Garcia on how to go about translating your Django applications. Marc is the Django localizer for the Catalan language. Learn more about Marc and localization on This Week in Django 20.

• Threaded Comments For Your Site Eric Florenzano’s article for the relatively new Python Magazine was published this month. Eric talks about his open source google code project django-threadedcomments and how to integrate the simple yet flexible threaded commenting system for Django-based websites.

Tip of the Week (1:00:50)

Use decorator_from_middleware to create a decorator that can be used in your views, which wraps up a middleware class.

from django.utils.decorators import decorator_from_middleware 
from django.middleware.middlewaremodule import MiddlewareClass 

decoratorfunc = decorator_from_middleware(MiddlewareClass)

This code is not documented but added as part of cache reworking. See this thread for more information:

• GoogleGroups Discussion

Thank You! (1:03:19)

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

• Kevin Fricovsky
  • Monty Lounge Industries – Kevin’s web strategy, design, and development company.
  • How I Work Daily – Kevin’s blog.

• Michael Trier
  • Michael on Twitter