This Week in Django 48

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

This week we talk about a few source commits, some cool projects from the community, and a Tip of the Week. We also have some very special music by Watching Cars (see the show notes below for more information).

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

Show Notes

TWiD Updates

• Poll Results – Which Django components, if any, have you used independently of Django?
  1) None, I always use Django just like Adrian said – 70%
  2) ORM – 17%
  3) Template system – 7%
  4) Admin Application – 4%
  5) NewForms – 2%

• This Week’s Poll – Prior to coming to Django what language or framework were you using?
  1) Rails
  2) TurboGears
  3) PHP
  4) Seaside
  5) Java
  6) Asp.NET

Big News (13:38)

TWiD is one year old! December 14th of 2007 was our very first show. This was before Brian even was involved. We want to thank all of our audience and if it weren’t for you we would have never been able to make the first anniversary! Thank you for your support and expect to be back again for another anniversary.

Tracking Trunk (16:41)

• SQLite version 3.6.2 is to be avoided like the plague (9542)

• Split CsrfMiddleware into Two Parts (9553) – Split CsrfMiddleware into two to make it more reusable. Also converted it to be a view middleware instead of request, as this allows more options.
  • New CsrfMiddleware features (9554) – Features automatic exceptions for known AJAX and decorator for manual exceptions

• Iterate over Hidden Fields (9569) – Added a way to iterate over hidden/visible fields in a form. Useful for manual form layout.

• Added permanent option to simple.redirect_to (9594) – Added a ‘permanent’ argument the simple.redirect_to() generic view. It’s True by default, to match existing behavior. If set to False, the redirect will be a 302 instead of a 301.

Community Catchup (35:29)

• Get User from session key in Django – So, you get an email from your Django app informing you of a server exception. Ever want to find out who the user is? Maybe do a little help desk support? This post details reverse engineering the sessionID provided in the exception email details and then querying Django’s Session tables and User table to pull back the related User.
  • django-extensions – One of the comments also noted that the popular django-command-extensions project provides a nice utility management command for this already – ‘print_user_for_session’.

• Randomized Include Tag – Template tag used for randomizing templates to include. This is especially useful if a section of your site rotates content at random that isn’t database driven.

• DjangoTracker – Loren Davie, co-founder of Django-NYC, created a nice utility for Twitter users interested in keeping track with Django trunk. Go follow djangotracker now and stay up to date!

• Django-axes – Keep track of failed login attempts – Keep track of failed login attempts in Django-powered sites. Two nice customizations that can be configured in your settings file are:
  • LOGIN_FAILURE_LIMIT: The number of login attempts allowed before a record is created for the failed logins. Default: 3
  • LOGIN_FAILURE_RESET: Determines whether or not the number of failed attempts will be reset after a failed login record is created. If set to False, the application should maintain the number of failed login attempts for a particular user from the time the server starts/restarts. If set to True, the records should all equate to LOGIN_FAILURE_LIMIT. Default: True

• Django-positions – A Django model field for managing user-specified positions.
  • models with order – Justin Lilly tweeted he found a similar sortable code snippet just the other day. This solution, though, implements “up” and “down” icons in the admin to promote sorting in the UI, which could be kinda sweet.

• Deploying Django with Fabric – Fabric has been getting a lot of love recently, and for good reason – it’s a simple yet powerful solution for deploying your apps, written in python, as their slogan says “simple pythonic deployment”. Will Larson
  • We mentioned Django-Fabric , a thin layer over the fabric deployment tool, during episode TWiD episode #40
  • Simple & Easy Deployment with Fabric and Virtualenv – LincolnLoop discusses using a combination of Fabric and VirtualEnv for its project but also released the Fabric files on Github as lincoln-loop-deploy – An easy-to-use Fabric script for deploying Python projects.

• djangolinks – a new Twitter account that posts django related links.

Tip of the Week (56:27)

render_to_response can take a list of templates to render in order of availability. This means it will render the first one that is present.

The admin uses this to let the user override templates in their TEMPLATE_DIRS paths.

Thank You! (1:02:06)

• Watching Cars - – Special music by Texas duo brothers David and Collin Gouldin with their band Watching Cars. Watching Cars is a unique blend of homespun roots and understated pop that will have its listener unknowingly whistling melodies the next day. David is also involved with Pegasus News, is a Django fan and listens to the show. Check out their music, it’s some really great stuff.

Additional Links

• Python 3.0
• Cleese

• The Show
  • Twitter Updates
  • FriendFeed Updates

• 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
  • Empty Thoughts Blog
  • Michael on Twitter

• Running Time: 1:18:43
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