Hello and happy Friday Django Round-up readers! Without delay, here's issue #5:
Featured
Django 1.5 brings in some great new features including the long awaited, configurable user model! "Experimental" Python 3 support landed and the docs have received a facelift as well. Don't forget about the new
ALLOWED_HOSTS
setting when you deploy. I've already seen a few people bitten by this. See
#19946
for details.
PyCon is next week and the sprints run March 18-21. A whole bunch of core developers will be in attendance. Follow progress on the
Django Development Dashboard
or, better yet, join
#django-sprint
on the Freenode IRC network and chip in!
Links of Interest
Most production Django deployments spend a surprising amount of time just connecting to the database server. This post outlines some add-on connection poolers and the work going into reusing database connections in the upcoming Django 1.6.
Django Suit is a modern theme for the Django admin based on Twitter Bootstrap. It supports all of Django's built-in widgets and adds a few of its own niceties to the mix. Free for personal use and reasonably priced for commercial projects.
Looking to take advantage of Django 1.5's new user model on an existing project? Here's a nice explanation on StackOverflow of how you'd migrate the data using South.
Did you know Visual Studio has built-in Django support? I didn't. It looks to be quite robust and even supports deploying to Windows Azure out-of-the-box.
A detailed write-up on how to get your static media pushed to S3 on deployment to Heroku.
A quick way to recognize the Do Not Track header on incoming requests and disable features to respect your visitors' privacy preferences.
Django's de-facto third party database migration tool, South, is great, but it doesn't fit everyone's needs. Chase Seibert built a new migration tool with some different core assumptions about the way migrations are managed. As an aside, Andrew Godwin, South's creator, is talking about
kickstarting the Django schema-migrations branch
to make projects like this easier in the future.
Some clever hacking to create a model that can only have one instance (one row in the database).
Django admin's search feature is great, but on sufficiently large databases, it can be agonizingly slow. Here are some tips on how to improve its performance.
New & Updated Packages
Jobs
Thanks for reading! Drop us a line and let us know what you thought so we can make the next round-up even better!
