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 ...

Read More

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

Categories: Django Python

Tags:

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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

Categories: Django Python

Tags: pycon

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 read an article by Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundation, titled Comments or Not? Public or Private? Relevant or Irrelevant?. It's a rather interesting read that I definitely recommend that covers the heated PyPi comments debate, issue tracking, and the surrounding Python community. There are also a number of insightful comments on this blog post, but I personally felt a lengthier blog post to be more fitting than a comment in retort.

First off, commenting on PyPi has stirred up quite a bit of debate. I personally feel that the pros are outweighed by the ...

Read More

Updated 12/02/09 @ 02:00PM CST by markr

Categories: Python

Tags: community pypi python

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

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: