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 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 ...

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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 ...

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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