This Week in Django 38

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

This week we do a DjangoCon retrospective, feature a special live interview with Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone, discuss a few source commits and some cool projects from the community.

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

Show Notes

• DjangoCon
  • DjangoCon videos on YouTube for those of you who weren’t at DjangoCon all the talks are now available on YouTube.

• Some DjangoCon Retrospectives
  • Brian Rosner’s DjangoCon: Opening the Door to the Future
  • Malcolm Tredinnick’s DjangoCon and Related Happenings
  • David Cramer’s DjangoCon 2008 is Over
  • Eric Florenzano’s DjangoCon: Great conference, or greatest conference ever?

• EuroDjangoCon 2009 will be in Prague – No dates announced yet but the location has been announced.

Big News (6:05)

• Django 1.1 roadmap and schedule
  • Version 1.1 Features – list of the cool things we can look forward to in 1.1.
• Django’s release process

Interview – Pownce (9:05)

We had the unique privilege of meeting up with Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone at Pownce’s offices in San Francisco. We discuss Pownce’s technology, the special challenges they’ve faced, and how using Django has benefitted them.

Pownce is a way to keep in touch with and share stuff with your friends. Send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients.

Tracking Trunk (49:04)

• Moved the bulk of the shortcut() function in django/views/defaults.py to a new module, django/contrib/contenttypes/views.py (9001)

• runserver now uses conditional GET for loading admin media (9055)

• Allowed null=True ForeignKey fields to be Sortable in the admin (9080)

Community Catchup (55:14)

• Latest Items on TWiD
  • Eric Florenzano’s Django from the Ground Up Series on TWiD
  • Callcast with Eric Holscher – The first official TWiD callcast was released last week, and Kevin talks with Eric Hollscher the creator of Django TestMaker and numerous debuggin/testing Django screencast.
  • Mention all the content we’ve brought in from our blogs and then inviting people to submit their own ideas, articles, casts, etc.

• Proposal: user-friendly API for multi-database support – Following all the discussion regarding multi-db support from DjangoCon, Simon Willison kick started an interesting discussion on django-dev google by offering detailed proposal for a user-friendly multi-db support. Definitely worth a read.

• Pownce is on Django 1.0 – The popular pownce.com team upgraded their Django powered website to 1.0 this past week. Follow TWiD on pownce at http://pownce.com/twid/

• Introducing django-debug-toolbar – Rob Hudson’s debug-toolbar project displays a configurable set of panels via html/css/jquery on the top of your browser window offering various debug information. Right now it supports – Django version, SQL queries including time to execute, Request timer, Common HTTP headers, GET/POST variable display, Cache stats, Templates used and template directories.
  • David Cramer’s post – http://www.davidcramer.net/code/280/django-debug-toolbar.html

• Django Tabbed Admin – Bas van Oostveen, maintainer of the popular Django Extensions project, posted an interesting blog post outlining how he used jQuery and overriding the Django Admin to create a tabbed admin interface. Check it out and be sure to see the cool screenshots.
  • Introduction to Gondala

• django-html – A Simon Willison project which offers a way of rendering django.forms widgets that differentiates between HTML and XHTML.

• Storm Support in Django – James Henstridge posts about the implementation of preliminary support for Storm within Django. Storm is Canonical’s Python ORM. It appears there’s lots of rough edges still, but if Storm is your thing you might want to head over and kick the tires a bit.

• Pinax Setup and Deployment – Greg Newman, the designer behind Cloud27.com details instructions on setting up and deploying Pinax, the reusable apps social networking platform (say that 5 times fast).

• django-rcsfield – This is something you’ve probably heard requested many time before. django-rcsfield fills a gap when you need to version content of your web app. The project features a custom model field (like models.TextField) for the Django web framework which – under the hood – versionizes it’s content. The ‘rcs’ in the name is short for revision control system. The current implementation works with Bazaar and SVN (and Git using Michael Trier’s git-python project). An abstration layer makes implementing additional backends easy.

• DenormField released – Andrew Godwin, known for his South db migrations project, released a new Django field that will automatically denormalise a field in a related table across to another model. He issues a warning that it is only briefly tested.

• Django Ponies are Everywhere.
  • The web framework for ponies – Bryan Veloso
  • djangopony – dedicated website to the unofficial django pony.
  • djangopony on Twitter – Follow all the great pony goodness.
  • Documents reveal Django pony caught in tail of Lies – classic Why the Lucky Stiff.

Thank You! (1:19:27)

• Our DjangoCon Stuff
  • Brian’s DjangoCon Video and Slides
  • Michael’s DjangoCon Videos

• TWiD News
  • TWiD is now on FriendFeed

• Running Time: 1:21:06
• Download: AAC, MP3, OGG