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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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

Categories: Django

Tags: django github templatetags

There are a wide variety of reasons why we should worry about testing in our Django applications, obviously. However, as a former system administrator, I have some ideals that are absolutely engraved straight into my brain I think. The main idiom being:
 
"Never do the same thing three times. Do it twice, the third time? Script it!"
 
Hence, my main reason for unit tests and continious integration is, simply put, laziness. I hate manually checking the site I'm working on to make sure my last commit hasn't broken anything crucial. Then the next system administration idiom comes into ...

Read More

Updated 10/19/09 @ 03:03PM CDT by markr

Categories: Django

Tags:

Welcome to the inaugural post of our new blog on our new microsite.  This will likely be my first and last post as our tech team will immediately take over and write of things Pythonic and Djangoriffic.  However, before that happens, I wanted to offer some thoughts on our decision to make our Python and Django development more externally facing.

Imaginary Landscape has been in the business of developing Web sites since 1995.  Up until recently, no one really cared about the underlying technology - at least not our typical clients.  Our decisionmakers come primarily from marketing departments.  They don't ...

Read More

Updated 10/29/09 @ 04:34PM CDT by brian

Categories: Django Python

Tags: