PUBLIC MARKS with search django

Django WikiApp is a pluggable application for Django that aims to provide a complete Wiki (for really small values of "complete")

Generally “fail fast” is a good engineering principle, because it’s helps you find problems sooner, and makes debugging much easier.

Haystack 1.0.0-final has been released (via the packages at PyPi or GitHub). You can also install it via ``sudo pip install django-haystack`` or via git from GitHub.

In this post I want to give a brief introduction to Django project layout from a Rails developer point of view, on what is there, what is not there and where to look for things. It should help a rails developer working on django be able to find the necessary files and underatnd the layout of the project files.

t work we have to manage a ton of Django based sites. Just for our World Company sites, we have over 50 different settings files, and this doesn't take into account the sites that we host for other clients. At this size it becomes basically impossible to test each site in a browser when you push things to production. To solve this problem I have written a very basic server description tool. This allows you to describe sites (settings file, python path, url, etc.) and servers.

The DB layer should return objects that are easy to cache and easy to invalidate. The built-in Django database classes (combined with memcache) should work fine for us here.

Minidetector is a Django reusable app that allows you to know if a request is being viewed on a mobile device. It provides a middleware and a view decorator that sets a request.mobile variable to True if the request is coming from a mobile device. It's method of figuring out if a device is mobile is simple; It first checks for a special Opera Mini header, then for WAP support, then finally checks the User Agent against a list of known mobile strings.

With such a large amount of content, searchability was essential. For this we built a custom technology stack based on Solr, Lucene and Haystack. Then, to keep all the previous links pointing in the right direction, we created a customizable scheme of Django regular expressions and Apache mod_rewrites.

helper for publishing data to Layar augmented reality browser from Django edit

getElementsBySelector is a python function which takes a standard CSS style selector and returns an array of elements objects from the document that match that selector. This is a frequently used function in JavaScript - if you use a library. Its kind of meaning less to have this function in the server side - unless you are doing screen-scarping. Then its very useful. Recently, I had to work on a Django app that does a bit of screen-scrapping - so I created this function to aid me.

in Rails, parts of the model design is actually stored in the database schema instead of in the Ruby code. I have started adding comments in the Rails model classes to be able to remember what properties they have without peeking in the Db. Typically I have a number of half-baked projects on my laptop and from time to time I forget what they do and these comments help me remember.

Django may be the Python web framework getting all the press recently, but web.py is definitely a nice, simple framework. One of the nice aspects of web.py is that it exposes methods for the basic HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and uses these methods to process each request from the client. This approach makes it amazingly easy to write a RESTful API.

This project aims to provide an easy to setup continuous integration server and client. The server side infrastructure is built on top of django. The tasks are described using fabric.

I recently wrote simple abstraction for exposing calendar events in Django as iCalendar feeds. It relies on vobject for managing the formatting of the calendar file, so you will need this if you want to try it out. It is available in Debian in the python-vobject package.

So, when I first picked up a guitar, the first song I sat down to learn, by ear, was Stairway to Heaven, not “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. So goes my experience with Django :)

whut_2.jpgSo, I’m one of those people where I don’t like running things “too far” from what a production setup might look like (I code on OS/X, deploy to Linux). This is why I jump(ed) through various hoops on my OS X system to get Apache/Django/mod_wsgi/etc all up and running and happy (not for serving the site; just developing).