Django Round-Up #5

Hello and happy Friday Django Round-up readers! Without delay, here’s issue #5:

Featured

Django 1.5 Released

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 Sprints

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

Fixing Database Connections in Django

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

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.

Migrating existing auth.User Data to a Custom User Model

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.

Using Visual Studio as an IDE for Django

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.

Configuring a Static Asset Pipeline with Django and Heroku

A detailed write-up on how to get your static media pushed to S3 on deployment to Heroku.

Do not forget Do Not Track

A quick way to recognize the Do Not Track header on incoming requests and disable features to respect your visitors’ privacy preferences.

Introducing Django Migratron

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.

Singleton Models

Some clever hacking to create a model that can only have one instance (one row in the database).

Optimizing Search in the Django Admin

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

django-constance Dynamic Django settings backed by Redis (or the database)
django-app-metrics capture and report on various events in your applications
django-sslserver an SSL-enabled development server for the Django Framework
django-admintheme a CSS only skin for the Django admin
django-braces Commonly needed add-on mixins for Django’s class-based views

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!