This Week in Django 53

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

This we talk about more 1.1 features that have landed, some community items and a tip of the week.

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

Show Notes

TWiD Updates

When will you update to Django 1.1?

• Never (1%)
• A Month (14%)
• A Week (13%)
• Trunk is the only stable version (37%)
• Immediately (36%)

This Week’s Poll

Where do you use Django?

• At work
• At home
• Both

EuroDjangoCon (w/ Robert Lofthouse)

Apologizes for the echo on both Brian’s and Eric’s tracks. It was better than the alternative at the time.

• Official EuroDjangoCon Website
• Where?
  • Prague
• When?
  • May 4–8th, 2009
• Who?
  • Any confirmed speakers (that you can speak about)
• Registration on Feb 10.

Tracking Trunk

• Changeset 9792 – Added F() expressions to query language. – Filter expressions compare a value of a model field with the value of another field on the same model. Thanks to the work of Nicolas Lara, Russell Keith-Magee, Alex Gaynor, Malcolm Tredinnick, and many others for all helping to ready this feature for inclusion in Django 1.1.

Community Catchup

• World, meet django-flatblocks 0.1.0 – Horst Gutmann talks about a new reusable app that’s suitable for including flatpage-like content in blocks on a site. It’s based off of Clint Ecker’s django-chunks, which we’ve mentioned before.

• Enable distutils for a Django reusable app – Yann Malet shows us how he converted his django-geotagging project into a distutils-enabled reusable app. He cites Pinax as his reasoning for exploring distutils.
  • Moving to Distutils – James Tauber talks about Pinax’s move to distutils and a bit about the reasoning behind the move.

• Django Site of the Week: ForecastWatch – Originally a Rails convert, ForcastWatch’s Django history goes back to even before Django’s magic-removal branch was merged into trunk. Eric Floehr talks about how he deals with a large amount of data by moving aggregation and processing offline. Eric’s working on a new Django project in his spare time to “help educate, entertain and bring people together while documenting our changing climate over time”. We can’t wait to see how it turns out!

• Better spam defense for django comments – John at Fairview Computing shares his spam defense mechanisms for Django comments. Most other spam filters for Django comments use either Akismet or TypePad’s AntiSpam, but this application implements its own local algorithms. It’s definitely worth checking it out if you’re having troubles with spam on your site.

• Some Simple Django Debugging Tools – Malcolm Tredinnick walks us through his tricks about how he uses some of Django’s built-in debugging tools, as well as his evaluation of the django-debug-toolbar project.

• Django Solr – As described by Simon Willison “Another attempt at a Django/Solr integration library, based on code written for “a top 20 newspaper site” (I’d love to know which one). This is well documented, uses a registration model clearly inspired by the Django admin which keeps search related metadata out of your regular models and includes management commands for re-indexing and generating Solr schema.xml files.” Correction: We said the Washington Post, but the correct paper is the Washington Times. Go figure, they both use Django!

Tip of the Week

Notes about supported databases – As some more advanced database features are added into Django’s ORM (like F() Expressions and aggregation), keeping up to date with the idiosyncrasies of your database backend becomes more important when trying to avoid pain and suffering.

This page in the Django documentation can sometimes be lost in the shuffle, but it’s a good thing to keep bookmarked and refer back to when things don’t seem to be working properly.

Thank You!

• The Show
  • Twitter Updates
  • FriendFeed Updates

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

• Eric Florenzano
  • Die in a Fire Blog
  • Eric on Twitter

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

• Running Time: 54:20
• Download: AAC, MP3, OGG