James Tauber’s talk about Pinax at DjangoCon is a really great look at Django’s killer feature: reusable apps. Pinax is basically a collection of reusable apps — some of which were built for Pinax, and others which are independent of it — that allow one to put together a site very quickly (especially if your site is centered around social networking, as that’s much of what Pinax provides at this point). The basic concept is to separate bits of functionality (friend relationships, commenting, tagging, voting, registration, etc.) from what James calls the “domain object.” The domain object is what makes your site unique. For flickr, it’s photos. For Newsvine, it’s news stories. For Cork’d, it’s wine. If Pinax can provide all the non-domain object bits, all you have to do it build your domain object, and you’re set. Even if you’ve no interest in writing Django apps, it’s a good discussion of modularity and how this stuff works when it’s done right.
I was also surprised and excited to see that the approach I’ve taken with Savoy. While Savoy is more content management oriented (and Pinax is more focused on social networking), the basic structure of the two projects is very similar. Savoy has a set of third party apps it pulls in, as well as a set of “core” apps that are required. On top of that are “contrib” apps that are all optional. So, you simply install the core apps, then pick and choose which contrib apps are appropriate for your project, and you’re off to the races. I’m working to make all of these apps as reusable as possible. This is an ongiong process, and chances are the first will release won’t be as reusable as I’d like. But, pluggability will always be a primary goal. Finally, you can of course run your own apps alongside Savoy’s apps. Some apps even have hooks to integrate your own apps where appropriate (for example, the aggregator app, which runs my tumblelog, will aggregate content from any model of your choice, not just those that Savoy itself provides).
If you’re interested in building a social sort of site, or how best-of-breed reusable Django apps are built, definitely check out Pinax, and James’ talk about it. Visit site »
Moderated by Adrian Holovaty, panelists Matt Waite (St. Petersberg Times), Maura Chace (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Matt Croydon (Lawrence Journal-World), and Ben Welsh (Los Angeles Times) discuss Django and journalism at DjangoCon. Really good stuff here. The discussion ranges from what’s great and not-so-great about Django in a newsroom to the general decline of the newspaper industry to how to get the “pointy-haired bosses” at traditional media organizations to buy into something other than the “pageviews equals dollars” worldview that is helping to destroy serious journalism in favor of photos of Lindsey Lohan. Really good talk. Visit site »
Probably the single most relevant DjangoCon talk for most Djano developers, this fireside chat with Adrian and Jacob really covers the bases on where the framework will go in the future. As a sidenote, it also is a nice showcase of Jacob and Adrian’s personalities: they’re both really, genuine nice guys who are bright as hell but not at all opposed to criticism or other views (traits, which, in my view, have permeated the entire Django community). I’ve had my arguments with both dudes, but in the end, I love ‘em both. Great guys. Visit site »
Cal’s well-received talk from DjangoCon is very funny while making some great points. Most of his “serious” complaints about Django revolve around massive scaling, which he deals with on a daily basis at Flickr (which has both a huge data set and huge traffic). The reality is that none of the hot shit frameworks right now (Django, Rails, Cake, etc.) offer a lot of built in niceties for this level of scaling, and this is why (or at least part of the reason) we have a few notable sites built on them that haven’t managed to scale well at all as they’ve gotten more popular (coughTWITTERcough). The big question, of course, is: should a general-purpose framework like Django or Rails cater to the top 100 websites in the world, or should they focus on the needs of the other 99.9%? I don’t know the answer (and Cal says he doesn’t, either), but it’s an interesting topic. Plus, did I mention Cal is funny? Visit site »
Webmonkey has some terrific coverage of DjangoCon, including this piece on the Django and journalism panel. What I took away from it is that Matt Croydon still wears his kakis with a cuff and a crease. Visit site »
Django 1.0’s release party will be at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday, September 6th at 7pm. I totally wish I could be there. Don’t feel sorry for me, though — I’ll be trying to find some hot karaoke action in London at the time. :) Visit site »
The first annual DjangoCon will take place September 6th and 7th at the Googleplex in Mountain View. It will coordinate with the 1.0 release of the popular web application framework, and will include a release party on Saturday night. There is only space for about 200 attendees, but the conference is free (you are, however, encouraged to make an optional donation to the Django Software Foundation to help cover costs). Visit site »