Good day Djangonauts! Enjoy today's tasty slice of Django Round-up (#11)...
Featured
It feels like 1.5 was just released, but 1.6 is already nearing completion. Major features include better (more secure) default settings and persistent database connections. If you weren't already running a database connection pooler, 1.6 should provide a noticeable speed increase on many sites.
The latest installment in Andrew Godwin's Django migrations project. This introduces the concept of an
Operation
and the declarative syntax which will be used to define schema migrations.
You'll still have to wait for the talks, but if you're curious about what a Django conference held outside under circus tents might look like, check out a few videos from the event. Even a few
very
seasoned conference-goers said this was
the best event
they've ever attended
.
Links of Interest
Part 1 of a video tutorial series by Arun Ravindran. It starts from the basics of using
virtualenv
up to building models and admins. There's also text to follow along if you prefer.
Heroku is probably
the
PaaS for deploying Django these days. Django co-BDFL, Adrian Holovaty outlines some issues he had with Heroku and how, with a little upfront work, he's developed a workflow on AWS that gives him many of the same benefits of Heroku. An interesting side-note, the other BDFL, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, recently
joined Heroku as their Director of Platform Security
-- pretty sure they're still friends though ;)
A video from the Boston Python meetup highlighting some differences between Flask and Django and where Flask shines.
Django has traditionally taken a pretty hard stance about adding in new functionality and features. Jacob Kaplan-Moss talks about what it takes to actually get a new feature into Django core.
Django REST Framework is fast becoming the go-to API library for Django. This post introduces it and some of the concepts that make it tick. It also introduces another package that provides automated documentation to your API similar to Django's
admindocs
app.
Bruno Renié provides some explanation for his preference to use environment variables for settings that change between environments and some examples of where it shines.
There have been a flurry of admin interface skins released lately. Django Admin2 has a slightly different goal. It aims to re-write the Python code underneath the admin to make it easier to modify and more extensible. This project would facilitate the effort to skin and modify the admin.
Wondering to yourself, why do we need another admin? In this post, a
django-grapelli
developer outlines the problems with the existing Django admin and how it could be improved (leading to the same conclusion as the Django Admin2 folks).
A
two part
blog post with some tips and tricks to sending email from inside your Django project. It includes tips on template organization and backgrounding the sending of email to keep your site speedy.
Django CMS core developer, Jonas Obrist, explains why and when you might want to use his app,
django-sekizai
. It provides a new and unique way of handling
block
level code in your templates.
An interesting REST based search server built on top of a the Sphinx search engine and a stack many Django developers are already familiar with, Nginx, MySQL, and Redis.
New & Updated Packages
Django Jobs
Thanks for reading!
Peter Baumgartner
Founder, Lincoln Loop
