I wish I’d known this a long time ago.  Django’s request object includes a dictionary of key/value pairs passed into the request via POST or GET methods.  That dictionary, however, works in a counter-intuitive fashion.  If a URL reads http://foo.com?a=boo, then the expected content of request.GET ( Read more... )

It drives me nuts that we in the Django community rely on Solr or Haystack to provide us with full-text search when MySQL provides a perfectly functional full-text search feature, at least at the table level and for modest projects. I understand that not every app runs on MySQL, but mine do, and I’m sure many of you are running exactly that, and ( Read more... )

Last night at the Django meetup, we also talked about unit testing.  Someone mentioned continuous integration, and we all discussed our favorites.  At one point, the fellow at whose offices we were holding the meeting mentioned that his team used Hudson and pulled up an example on the overhead projector.  I mentioned that Hudson was my favorite as ( Read more... )

Inspired by Five Web Files That Will Improve Your Website, I decided this morning to implement OpenSearch on the Indieflix Website. (It’s not up yet, we’re still beta’ing it, and it’s along with a massive list of changes that still need testing, so don’t go looking for it.) OpenSearch is a way to turn your site’s search feature into an RSS feed: ( Read more... )

As I’ve been working on a project at Indieflix, I’ve been evaluating other people’s code, including drop-ins, and for the past couple of days a pattern has emerged that, at first, bugged the hell out of me. Django has these lovely things called context processors- they allow you to attach specific elements of code to the request context before the ( Read more... )

We all know the drill with MySQL and Django.  You have a dev database, probably compressed, and you need to roll it out so your server’s in a “pristine” state before you start running migrations and adding stuff.  And the routine typically looks something like this: gzip -dc dev_database.gz | mysql -u djanguser -p djangodb.  It is also perfectly ( Read more... )

So, I got tired of the way Django-SocialAuth was borked and not working for me, so I forked the project and have put up my own copy at GitHub.

There are three things I noticed about the project right away: First, it forces you to use a broken templating scheme. I haven’t fixed that, but in the meantime I’ve ripped out all of the base.html calls to ( Read more... )

Eddie Sullivan at Chickenwing Software has a fascinating post entitled The Facebook Platform is Dead. I agree with many of his comments. I don’t think there’s anything terrible about the “Facebook Certified Application” program; that’s a business decision, not a software policy decision. But Sullivan says one thing that set me off. He wrote:

( Read more... )

I use Django signals a lot in my professional work, mostly to create specialized tables that track events in the ecosystem of social networking sites that I build.  For example, if I make a post on a social networking site, that causes an event that creates a signal.  That signal will be heard by, for example: (1) a reward mechanism, which might ( Read more... )

I needed some rails-like environment settings using Django.  This is the quick and easy way to get that done.   First, after building your “settings.py” file, create an environment under your project root named “env“.   Move your settings.py file to this directory, rename it “development.py"

Now, in your root directory, open up a new file named “ ( Read more... )