Django Round-Up #6

¡Buenos dias Django Round-Up readers! Here's issue #6 with lots of PyCon goodness:

Featured

Goodbye, Malcolm

Today's round-up starts on a horribly somber note. The Django community lost one of its leaders last week when Malcolm Tredinnick passed away. He was an amazing person and the tributes poured in from everywhere . Rest in peace Malcolm, you will be missed.

Caring for Your Baby Ecosystem

Django BDFL Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave a talk at Heroku's Waza conference about the Django ecosystem and how stable APIs have fostered its growth. He draws an interesting analogy between Django and the tractor he has on his farm. Well worth the watch.

Python.org Preview

The Python.org redesign team released an early preview of Python's new site at PyCon last week. Sign up at the site to become a beta-tester and help shape the future of Python.org. The site is using the new Python 3.3 support in Django 1.5.

Links of Interest

Porting Django apps to Python 3

Like it or not, Python 3 is upon us. In this video from PyCon, Jacob Kaplan-Moss talks about his experience porting third-party Django apps to Python 3 and shares techniques to make it as painless as possible.

Improved Database Transaction Management in 1.6

With Django 1.5 out the door, work has already begun on 1.6. One of the first big features is greatly improved database transaction handling. If you ever fiddled with the autocommit option in the past, this one is sure to make you happy. Excellent work by Aymeric Augustin handling this nearly single-handedly and closing out a slew of issues in the process. The diff is impressive .

Getting Started with Automated Testing

A great intro presentation on testing in Python by Carl Meyer. If you've been holding off on learning how to test your code or never knew why it was important, watch this talk. Even if you're an old hat with TDD, you might learn something new here.

Python Profiling

NewRelic Python engineer, Amjith Ramanujam, shows off some of the profiling tools Python has to offer and how you might use them in a real-world scenario.

Circus: A Process and Socket Manager

A modern Django web stack requires lots of processes, a web server like gunicorn which forks off a few workers, a task queue like celery which forks off a few more, maybe a Redis instance, etc. Everything is managing it's own processes, then you have another process like supervisord, upstart, or monit to manage all that. Circus, from the folks at Mozilla, is a different take on that stack offering more flexibility and visibility into what your processes are doing.

Django Fancy Cache

Another tool coming out of Mozilla, Fancy Cache is Django's cache_page decorator on steroids. It's developer, Peter Bengtsson, also released mincss a tool that will analyze your page for unused CSS selectors. He uses them both on his site to actually inline the exact CSS that each page uses. Read more here .

Serving Static Files in Django

Django added the staticfiles app a few versions back, but there is still a lot of confusion on how it works. If you're new to Django or haven't been following along closely, this post goes in depth on exactly how to use it and when specific settings come into play.

New & Updated Packages

tastypie A security release for this popular API framework was just issued. If you're tastypie user, upgrade ASAP.
q get debugging info out of servers that like to swallow output (I'm looking at you AppEngine)
django-janitor use bleach to clean HTML stored in a Model field.
django-compressor Django's popular static file compressor gets a big update
django-hyperadmin a HATEOAS API framework for building resources in Django