One of the most important decisions you make in the process of building a new Django application is what software stack you use to serve it to the world. You're not lacking for options: people run Django on Apache, lighty, nginx, and Cherokee. You also need to decide how to connect Django to your webserver. Popular choices are mod_python, mod_wsgi, and fastcgi. Django also supports multiple database backends, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and Oracle.

What follows is a description of the software and setup we use at Imaginary Landscape, along with explanations for why we made these choices. At ...

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Updated 09/01/10 @ 11:53AM CDT by lholladay

Categories: Django Python

Tags:

The first time I used the new link attachment tool found on sites like Facebook, I thought I had experienced something magical.  After pasting an external webpage URL into my wall-post form, an image, page title, and page description of the linked webpage appeared beneath my post as though out of a puff of smoke from the Internet cloud.  I could cycle through a variety of thumbnails associated with the linked webpage and choose one, such as a logo or avatar, that represented the linked page appropriately.  The attached hyperlink was no longer simply a hyperlink - it was a rich ...

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Updated 08/26/10 @ 02:26PM CDT by jjasinski

Categories: Django

Tags: Django Link Lookup Python URL

The more we dig into DjangoCMS, the more we like it.  Already, we have adopted it for a number of client sites as well as internal sites.  We are extending it to handle more complex presentations and it is working great.

Its simple interface belies its sophistication, when configured well.  It has proven to be so useful that we are installing it on client sites for our own use.

We continue to learn about it and put it through its paces.  There is a lot that can be done without forking it off, which is highly appealing for client and ...

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Updated 05/13/10 @ 11:21AM CDT by brian

Categories: Django Python

Tags:

We have just completed our third year as a sponsor of PyCon and I thought I'd take a few minutes to reflect on our use of Python as well as the conference itself.

Pretty much everyone I spoke to was impressed that we've been programming Web sites in Python since 1997.  Several thanked us for our support over so many years.  I'm always somewhat bemused when we are thanked for our use of Python.  Although we've always had open source sensibilities, our choice of Python wasn't so much altruistic as it was a business decision ...

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Updated 02/24/10 @ 10:07AM CST by brian

Categories: Django Python

Tags: pycon

There's been a healthy amount of discussion about how applications should handle settings. As the creator of Mingus pointed out, it's a weird situation. You want anyone to be able to use your application with as little fuss as possible, but at the same time you just need to have at least some settings involved. When I wrote my blog application, YaBa, I had somewhere around ten different settings that users needed to configure. Every setting you add creates a bit more complexity for the end user, adds more to your documentation, and inevitably leads to you have ...

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Updated 02/18/10 @ 12:38PM CST by markr

Categories: Django

Tags: configuration django python settings

Imaginary Landscape has been a sponsor of open source efforts since its founding in 1995. This year is already off to a great start, with plenty of great events happening in the Chicago area.

On January 9th and 10th a Django Sprint was held at Everyblock's office, just a little South of our offices. We provided pizza, beer and soda for lunch and one of our programmers, Larisa Hoffenbecker, attended both days of the sprint. As always a lot of good work was done during the sprint, including everything from fixing broken links and typos to changes to model ...

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Updated 01/22/10 @ 04:04PM CST by cpeters

Categories: Django Python

Tags: chipy pycon sprint

I recently started working on another new project here at Imaginary Landscape, and this one looked rather enticing as it threw some stuff my way that I haven't had a chance to play with much recently. First on that chopping block was a multi-page registration form application. Immediately I remembered reading about Django's Form Wizard module and thought it'd be a great way to handle this small application. At least I thought so until I finished reading the specifications for the project and realized that the user must be able to move both backwards and forwards through ...

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Updated 12/14/09 @ 11:13AM CST by markr

Categories: Django

Tags: django forms

One issue I've run into a couple times while working with Django is the need to serve files to users based on permissions. The first situation occurred with a store we were building that would allow for electronic versions of books to be sold. These books would typically be distributed in PDF format but overall to the story, the format is irrelevant. In this scenario I needed to be able to take the ID of a book and return a PDF download to the user. However, I only wanted to do this if the user passed proper authentication and ...

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Updated 11/17/09 @ 03:15PM CST by markr

Categories: Django Python

Tags: apache django nginx permissions python user

At Imaginary Landscape, we definitely enjoy leveraging the many open source applications that exist out in the wild. We also create some of our own open source applications, along with a few closed source applications that are either too customized for one particular customer, or for a number of other reasons dealing with clients and such. However, a constant problem arises with all of these different applications floating about. How do you deal with templates and media? A recent callcast by DjangoDose (highly recommend listening to this by the way) covers the topic to some degree, but nobody has a ...

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Updated 11/04/09 @ 01:50PM CST by markr

Categories: Django Python

Tags: django pluggable python staticmedia

It seems like I frequently find myself needing to write template tags for the various projects I work on here at Imaginary Landscape. The most common reason is generally so that I can adhere to the ideas of the DRY principle. For instance, YaBa has the potential to craft a rather lengthy sidebar with Twitter updates, GitHub activity, links, categories and archives, all of which are dynamic content. To make it more problematic, that side bar is in every single view. In order to accomplish that without template tags, I'd need to return objects for each of those in ...

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Updated 10/26/09 @ 02:45PM CDT by markr

Categories: Django

Tags: django github templatetags