The Django team has once again announced a new release of their absolutely amazing framework. Right on schedule, version 1.0.1 has been made available to the world. This release packs over two hundred fixes over the original Django 1.0 codebase. I'm in the process of upgrading my sites right now!
For more information, see the following links:
For anyone who's interested, you can now see what Pendulum can look like out of the box (with the addition of a little CSS). The color scheme is kinda fugly, but that's okay because it's not a real site!
If you want to see the screenshots, head on over to the project page.
Here's yet another application to help you make your site more useful to your users. django-reploc is a "representative locator" for Django-powered Web sites. It uses the Google Maps API to offer your users an interactive map of your representatives, vendors, friends, houses, etc.
I built this application to be a dealer locator for one of my clients. The application provides a way for you to create "representatives," and each representative may have one or more locations. For example, say you are a producer of clothing and apparel, ranging from shoes to pants to t-shirts to sweaters to hats to bags and so on. Perhaps your bigger representatives (or vendors) carry your products in all of their retail branches. reploc gives you a way to display each of these locations for the one vendor on a map for your users.
In addition to that, while the bigger vendors might carry your products in all locations, perhaps some locations only carry particular lines of your products. For example, a vendor location in Miami, Florida might carry a good deal of your sandals and none of your sweatshirts, while a vendor location in Bangor, Maine might not bother with any sandals but keeps sweatshirts in stock year-round. reploc offers a way for you to describe which product lines each location carries by the use of "attributes".
However, it can be used for much more than just that. Pretty much any location that you can show on Google Maps (is there anything that can't be shown on Google Maps anymore?) can be displayed with this application.
Furthermore, you can search for locations within a certain radius of an address that your users specify! A nice circle is drawn on the map, making it visually easier to understand what is and isn't within range. To make things even easier, the locations that do not fall within the radius of the given address are hidden from the map.
Finally, once a user finds a location within the radius of the address they specify, they are able to get driving directions to help them get right where they need to go!
w00t!
To learn more, go to the project page: http://code.google.com/p/django-reploc/
Up until a couple weeks ago, I had never installed a FavIcon on any of my Django sites. I never really thought about it until one day I enabled the SEND_BROKEN_LINK_EMAILS setting for one of my sites. As soon as I did that, I was able to track down links to broken pages very quickly. It also notified me that I didn't have a favicon.ico file setup anywhere on my site, and there are a great many programs out there that look for this file automatically.
At first I tried to go through Apache to get this working, but I'm no Apache guru so I was less than successful in taking this route. A couple of days ago I figured out a little trick to make the missing favicon.ico file stop sending me "broken link" e-mails hundreds of times a day. The solution? Put a favicon on my site, of course!
The approach I took was to simple add some information to my main urls.py file. Here's the line straight from my URLconf:
(r'^favicon\.ico$', 'django.views.generic.simple.redirect_to', {'url': '/static/images/favicon.ico'}),
Hah! Simple isn't it? This way Apache is still handling the actual serving of the static image file--Django just handles the redirect. Ever since I added this line to my URLconf, I've not received one "broken link" e-mail pertaining to the missing favicon.ico file. That leads me to believe that most applications can understand the redirect and plug the actual image file where it belongs.
Oh, and for those of you who might be curious... My favicon.ico is actually just a PNG image that I renamed to favicon.ico. Again, most things seem to understand this (but I could be wrong).
See below for a more complete example of my URLconf
Ever curious to see information about failed login attempts on your site? This morning I threw together a small, simple Django application that allows you to do just that. I'm calling this project django-axes, which is pronounced as "jango access".
I've only tested it on my own site, so it must still undergo some more in-depth testing before I can call it a stable application. From my testing, however, it works exactly as I expect it to.
For more information, check out the project homepage on Google Code.
I've made several fun improvements to my Pendulum Django application. Perhaps the most noteworthy for most people is the addition of a default jQuery-powered date picker for adding and updating entries. I was hesitant to make anything like this be required because some people might prefer controls other than the one I chose. However, I tried to make it easy to override this default date picker if you so desire. Hopefully someone will report on how easy/difficult it is.
Also, I've added django-pendulum to the PyPI, which is Python's little package repository. You can think of it as an apt-get repository for those of you familiar with Debian/Ubuntu Linux or derivatives. There is a utility called easy_install, which obviously makes it easy to install packages that are found in the PyPI. The command to install django-pendulum with easy_install is easy_install django-pendulum. Good stuff!
There have been various other changes to the code, and I have some more changes planned. We'll see how long it takes me to get around to making these changes...
For those of us who like to know how much time we spend on various projects, I've released a little project to help you out. Pendulum is a small Django application that I've been using to keep track of the time I work on my various personal projects. It's very easy to use, and it's been working great for me for several months.
This weekend I took the time to make several improvements that I deemed necessary before I could make the project publicly accessible. While I've done some testing on my own, I'm fairly certain that I haven't tried all combinations of situations, so there might be some problems that you find as you use it.
To learn more, head on over to http://code.google.com/p/django-pendulum/. There you can learn how to download and install it and what you need to do to configure it.
Enjoy!
The other day at work I was involved in a humorous discussion about having our organization's Web site change colors depending on what day of the year it was. We threw around all sorts of fun ideas, knowing full well that it would never happen for our organization. It would be too unprofessional.
That night my allergies were bothering me to the point where I couldn't sleep, so I decided to see what I could do about making our discussion more possible, at least for others who can take a little more creative license than us. By morning, I had a working application that could effectively change the colors on a Web page depending on the date.
Today I released the source code on Google Code, hoping that someone more creative than me might take it and experiment to make something both attractive and useful.
You can learn more at the project's homepage: http://code.google.com/p/django-seasonal-stylesheets/
This article is a related to my previously posted article about installing Django, an advanced Web framework for perfectionists, on your own computer. Now we will learn how to install Django on a shared hosting account, using Site5 and fastcgi as an example. Depending on your host, you may or may not have to request additional privileges from the support team in order to execute some of these commands.
Note: Django requires at least Python 2.3. Newer versions of Python are preferred.
Note: This HOWTO assumes familiarity with the UNIX/Linux command line.
Note: If the wget command doesn't work for you (as in you don't have permission to run it), you might try curl [url] -O instead. That's a -O as in upper-case o.
Site5 (and many other shared hosting providers that offer SSH access) already has Python installed, but you will want to have your own copy so you can install various tools without affecting other users. So go ahead and download virtual python:
mkdir ~/downloads cd ~/downloads wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/virtual-python.py
Virtual Python will make a local copy of the installed Python in your home directory. Now you want to make sure you execute this next command with the newest version of Python available on your host. For example, Site5 offers both Python 2.3.4 and Python 2.4.3. We want to use Python 2.4.3. To verify the version of your Python, execute the following command:
python -V
If that displays Python 2.3.x or anything earlier, try using python2.4 -V or python2.5 -V instead. Whichever command renders the most recent version of Python is the one you should use in place of python in the next command. Since python -V currently displays Python 2.4.3 on my Site5 sandbox, I will execute the following command:
python ~/downloads/virtual-python.py
Again, this is just making a local copy of the Python installation that you used to run the virtual-python.py script. Your local installation is likely in ~/lib/python2.4/ (version could vary).
To reduce confusion and hassle, let's give our new local installation of Python precedence over the system-wide Python. To do that, open up your ~/.bashrc and make sure it contains a line similar to this:
export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
If you're unfamiliar with UNIX-based text editors such as vi, here is what you would type to use vi to make the appropriate changes:
Once you've made the appropriate changes to ~/.bashrc, you need to make those changes take effect in your current SSH session:
source ~/.bashrc
Now we should verify that our changes actually took place. Type the following command:
which python
If they output of that command is not something like ~/bin/python or /home/[your username]/bin/python, something probably didn't work. If that's the case, you can try again, or simply remember to use ~/bin/python instead of python throughout the rest of this HOWTO.
Now we should install Python's setuptools to make our lives easier down the road.
cd ~/downloads wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py python ez_setup.py
This gives us access to a script called easy_install, which makes it easy to install many useful Python tools. We will use this a bit later.
Let's now download the most recent development version of Django. SSH into your account and execute the following commands (all commands shall be executed on your host).
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk ~/downloads/django-trunk
Now we should make a symlink (or shortcut) to Django and put it somewhere on the Python Path. A sure-fire place is your ~/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ directory (again, that location could vary from host to host):
ln -s ~/downloads/django-trunk/django ~/lib/python2.4/site-packages ln -s ~/downloads/django-trunk/django/bin/django-admin.py ~/bin
Now verify that Django is installed and working by executing the following command:
python -c "import django; print django.get_version()"
That command should return something like 1.0-final-SVN-8964. If you got something like that, you're good to move onto the next section. If, however, you get something more along the lines of...
Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in ? ImportError: No module named django
...then your Django installation didn't work. If this is the case, make sure that you have a ~/downloads/django-trunk/django directory, and also verify that ~/lib/python2.4/site-packages actually exists.
In order for your Django projects to become useful, we need to install some other packages: PIL (Python Imaging Library, required if you want to use Django's ImageField), MySQL-python (a MySQL database driver for Python), and flup (a utility for fastcgi-powered sites).
easy_install -f http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging easy_install mysql-python easy_install flup
Sometimes, using easy_install to install PIL doesn't go over too well because of your (lack of) permissions. To circumvent this situation, you can always download the actual PIL source code and install it manually.
cd ~/downloads wget http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz tar zxf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz cd Imaging-1.1.6 ln -s ~/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6/PIL ~/lib/python2.4/site-packages
And to verify, you can try this command:
python -c "import PIL"
If that doesn't return anything, you're good to go. If it says something about "ImportError: No module named PIL", it didn't work. In that case, you have to come up with some other way of installing PIL.
Let's attempt to setup a sample Django project.
mkdir -p ~/projects/django cd ~/projects/django django-admin.py startproject mysite cd mysite mkdir media templates
If that works, then you should be good to do the rest of your Django development on your server. If not, make sure that ~/downloads/django-trunk/django/bin/django-admin.py exists and that it has a functioning symlink (shortcut) in ~/bin. If not, you'll have to make adjustments according to your setup. Your directory structure should look something like:
Now we need to make your Django project accessible from the Web. On Site5, I generally use either a subdomain or a brand new domain when setting up a Django project. If you plan on having other projects accessible on the same hosting account, I recommend you do the same. Let's assume you setup a subdomain such as mysite.mydomain.com. On Site5, you would go to ~/public_html/mysite for the next few commands. This could differ from host to host, so I won't go into much more detail than that.
Once you're in the proper place, you need to setup a few things: two symlinks, a django.fcgi, and a custom .htaccess file. Let's begin with the symlinks.
ln -s ~/projects/django/mysite/media ~/public_html/mysite/static ln -s ~/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media ~/public_html/mysite/media
This just makes it so you can have your media files (CSS, images, javascripts, etc) in a different location than in your public_html.
Now for the django.fcgi. This file is what tells the webserver to execute your Django project.
And finally, the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(media/.*)$ - [L] RewriteRule ^(static/.*)$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(django.fcgi) RewriteRule ^(.*)$ django.fcgi/$1 [L] |
The .htaccess file makes it so that requests to http://mysite.mydomain.com/ are properly directed to your Django project. So, now you should have a directory structure that something that looks like this:
If that looks good, go ahead and make the django.fcgi executable and non-writable by others:
chmod 755 ~/public_html/mysite/django.fcgi
After that, head over to http://mysite.mydomain.com/ (obviously, replace the mydomain accordingly). If you see a page that says you've successfully setup your Django site, you're good to go!
I've noticed that I need to "restart" my Django sites on Site5 any time I change the .py files. There are a couple methods of doing this. One includes killing off all of your python processes (killall ~/bin/python) and the other simply updates the timestamp on your django.fcgi (touch ~/public_html/mysite/django.fcgi). I find the former to be more destructive and unreliable than the latter. So, my advice is to use the touch method unless it doesn't work, in which case you can try the killall method.
Good luck!
That's right folks! The amazing Django team has announced the immediate availability of Django 1.0 final!
This release is perhaps one of the most highly anticipated events in the Python community. More than three years in the making, the Django Web framework is something that perfectionist developers love and enjoy using. I've been using it for just over a year now, and I can't even remember doing things any other way! It's absolutely amazing!!!
So go ahead and download and install it today! What are you waiting for?!