Modular search arrives for django

Haystack 1.0 has just been released to provide an easy way to search through your models via modular search.

http://toastdriven.com/fresh/haystack-10-final-released/

Looks exciting and really quick to plug a search into a new site.

Check haystack out here:

http://haystacksearch.org/

The Django Community Blogs List

An excellent resource for up to date information about what is happening with django:

http://www.djangoproject.com/community/

I don´t know how I missed this for so long, and also why is there not a link through from the front page of the Django website with the latest entries to promote the community space more?

Dojo gets Dialogs for Dialogs

For my web apps, I often need one pop up dialog to open another, both being modal. Up to and including Dojo 1.3 this wasn´t possible, but as of Dojo 1.4 or in the current subversion trunk it has been added. See ticket http://trac.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/6759 for more information. Nice work to the Dojo team, I have been upgrading from .4 to the current svn release and am impressed by the framework. I even find lots of documentation.

Before I had considered switching to jQuery UI, but the jQuery UI is not mature or complete enough for large scale rich applications. Dojo´s stability and huge offering of premade widgets convinced me to stay with Dojo, and I think it was a good choice.

Dojango = Dojo + Django

I am happy to find out my favorite server side web application framework is already linked to my favorite browser app framework.

http://code.google.com/p/dojango/

One really cool feature is the middle ware that lets you use Dojo by default for the Django admin inputs. Nice!

Django 1.1 What´s New?

It was exciting to see that Django 1.1 has been released. It seems like one of the last bugs that was holding up the project was more complex than it seems. The bug had to do with properly reversing urls, which led to the creation of url namespaces, which seems like an excellent solution to me.

From the Django Site:

Django 1.1 improves named URL patterns with the introduction of URL "namespaces."

In short, this feature allows the same group of URLs, from the same application, to be included in a Django URLConf multiple times, with varying (and potentially nested) named prefixes which will be used when performing reverse resolution. In other words, reusable applications like Django's admin interface may be registered multiple times without URL conflicts.

This is fundamental if you start building large sites and need to customize various admin panels, or reuse applications accross a large site.

You can view the Django 1.1 release notes here:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.1/

Other big enhancements seem to be in stretching the capabilities of the ORM and the way that models can be used with forms via proxy models.

The GeoDjango project has also been integrated into the django core for applications that need to use spatial data.

Another change on the Django site is that comments have been removed entirely. It does seem to take away a bit of the community feel that the project had in the past, and it would be nice to know what prompted the change.

Elsewhere on the web:

WebMonkey - Django 1.1 Arrives Just in Time for DjangoCon 2009

Excess.org - Django 1.1 Talk Text, Django 1.1 Talk Video
(prerelease overview, but interesting for those new to Django)

MoreThanSeven.com - What´s new in Django 1.1

DjangoRocks.com - Django 1.1 now live

Django Best Practice Guides and Interesting Blogs

A personal list of some good guides and blogs as I find them

Guides

• A nice list of django best practices by Lincoln Loop in Colorado
• Setting up Django on a production server by IBM
• Debugging Django
• Notes on using pip and virtualenv with Django
• Pip vs. Buildout
  

Blogs

• Jakob Kaplan-Moss
• Eric Holscher
  
• Pointy-Stick
  
• The B-List
• Django Aware Blog
• Uswaretech Blog

Books

• The Official Django Book online
• Django 1.0 Website Development from Packt Publishing
  

Have a good django blog, guide, or tutorial? Send me an email at tom.gruner@gmail.com and I will review it and add it.

Setting up Django on a vps

It´s not often that I have really nice experiences with linux. But I have to say, installing django on a vps has really been a pleasure, no compatability problems and quick to do.

My choice of hosting was a openvz basic vps from a2hosting.com. I chose the centos 5 afull linux distribution, because I had a conflict with the centos 5 lamp version one when I tried yum update.

You have to install a few thing on it, but if you follow the tutorial for setting up the server here:

http://www.rayheffer.com/linux%20web%20server.shtml


and install mysql yourself (if you choose the afull version)

yum install mysql mysql-server
/sbin/chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Then you get a nice empty vps to play with ready for your aps! And no control panel like plesk or cpanel that makes it confusing on how to set up vhosts, just go ahead with the normal vhosts on apache.

The one real gotcha that happened to me is that mysqld confilcts with yum for some reason and yum complains about not being able to start a new thread. There is a work around about turning off the yum plugin that allows the nearest host lookup. Or, if it´s an option you can just stop mysqld for a moment.

The error I got with yum was:


File "/usr/lib/python2.4/threading.py", line 416, in start
_start_new_thread(self.__bootstrap, ())
thread.error: can't start new thread

and the fix was to this:

cd /etc/yum
# ls
pluginconf.d yum-daily.yum

# cd pluginconf.d/
# ls
downloadonly.conf fastestmirror.conf

# mv fastestmirror.conf fastestmirror.conf.unused

After a bit more experience, I suspected as well that I needed to optimize mysql memory usage a bit and followed some ideas on this blog post for mysql:
http://www.satchmoproject.com/blog/2007/sep/25/optimizing-django-vps-setup/