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

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