Django Round-Up #12

Bienvenidos a Django Round-up #12!

Featured

Jeremy Dunck joins the DSF Board

Jeremy Dunck, former Django Software Foundation secretary, was voted into the board seat vacated by Alex Gaynor (who left to become director of the Python Software Foundation). Andy McKay will be stepping in to fill Jeremy Dunck’s shoes as DSF secretary.

Django Circus Talk Videos Posted

We posted a few videos from Django Circus on the last round-up, but the actual talks were notably absent. The videos of the talks are now posted on their YouTube channel. Carve out a couple days and enjoy :)

Links of Interest

Core Concepts of Django ModelForms

Daniel Greenfeld continues his line of informative Django blog posts with this one on what ModelForms do and how to use them.

Making your Django app more pluggable

Some tips and tricks from Dan Poirer at Caktus Group on how to create better reusable apps for Django. Topics include how to handle settings, templates, and dependencies.

Python App Deployment with Native Packages

This one isn’t Django specific, but it certainly applies to any Django developers handling deployment. Python core developer, Hynek Schlawack, discusses deploying Python applications as a native OS package (dpkg on Debian/Ubuntu for example). Once the package is properly created, deployment across many servers is trivial and fool-proof.

Adding `/admin/` as a Wink to Django Developers

Django co-BDFL, Adrian Holovaty, discusses the intentional anonymity of Django as framework and suggests adding tiny easter egg to your Django site for other Django developers to find.

Instagram’s Admin Page

Probably not too newsworthy if it weren’t for Adrian’s post a few days earlier. Proof of Instagram’s Django roots was publicly available up until recently via an exposed admin login page. Instagram responded and locked down the page.

Conditional Logic in Django Forms

Not all forms are designed so that they fit neatly into Django forms objects. This post explores one option of handling more complex forms via overriding the __init__ method. Be sure to read the comments for some other suggestions on how to handle this scenario.

Managing Django Settings Files

Well, I have to admit, I thought I’d seen it all when it came to the myriad of ways to handle Django settings for different environments, but this is new to me. It involves building settings files from pre-existing templates and then managing them in a local DVCS.

Since Tastypie typically isn’t outputting HTML responses, the indispensable Debug Toolbar doesn’t work out-of-the-box with it. This post contains a quick hack to allow you to render HTML from Tastypie and view the toolbar.

A Custom User Model App for Everyone

An introduction to django-authtools which implements much of the boilerplate necessary to get up and running with your own custom User model.

A Deferred Logging File Handler for Django

Overriding a logging config to change a single file path for the given environment is painful and error prone. David Winterbottom describes the issue and his solution of using a custom File Handler to simplify the situation. A few other good options are presented in the comments as well.

New & Updated Packages

django-html5-appcache Manage HTML5 Appcache Manifest files for dynamic Django web applications.
django-waitinglist Waiting list app for running a private beta with cohorts support.
django-redis Full-featured Redis cache backend.
django-cacheops Automatic or manual queryset caching and automatic granular event-driven invalidation, backed by Redis.

Django Jobs

Thanks for reading. See you in a couple of weeks!