Week in review: May 7

Now that the magic-removal branch has merged and we're focusing all Django development on a single place, it's time to get back in the groove of "week in review" entries.

Aside from the huge news of the magic-removal merge, here are the highlights of the Django improvements that happened after the merge:

• Changeset 2815: Fixed off-by-one line number in heading of debug error pages.
• Changeset 2817: Accessing many-to-many relationships without a PK value now throws an exception. Thanks, Luke Plant.
• Changeset 2840: Fixed broken nav links in password_change_done admin page. Thanks for reporting, mdt@emdete.de.
• Changeset 2841: Made django/contrib/auth/create_superuser.py a command-line function, and added docs.
• Changeset 2842: Added rlcompleter autocompletion to 'manage.py shell' if IPython is not used. This gives you the benefit of tab completion (Unix only) even if you don't have IPython installed.
• Changeset 2843: The LocaleMiddleware now sets the Content-Language header. Thanks, ubernostrum.
• Changeset 2845: Fixed a Windows error in django.core.management. Thanks, ross.lazarus@gmail.com.
• Changeset 2847: Added svn:ignore for pyc files for all Django packages. Thanks for the idea, Christopher Lenz.
• Changeset 2851: Fixed a bug in the date conversion in the SQLite backend. Thanks, dart@google.com.
• Changeset 2852: Improved runserver to display 'CONTROL-C' vs. 'CTRL-BREAK' based on the current platform. It's the little details like this that really count.
• Changeset 2864: The debug view no longer assumes _get_lines_from_file returns None. Thanks, django@binaryfeed.org.

In other Django news:

• Wow. Jeff Croft's blog entry about converting his site to Django attracted a ton of attention. It hovered near the top of del.icio.us popular for quite some time and attracted a lot of blog chatter. I've seen a lot of new names on the django-users mailing list, too. To all new Django users: Welcome! And, I gotta say, Jeff's site looks really slick.
• None other than Python creator Guido van Rossum writes: "Django is gaining steam big way. Last week, a special baypiggies (Bay Area Python Interest Group) meeting drew huge crowds to listen to Django developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss. ... Several Googlers are asking about Django too!"
• Chris McAvoy wrote Django should be on MySpace. Well, I'm not quite sure how this happened, but the framework signed itself up for an account and created a page! Word on the street is, it's anxious to make new friends.
• Eugene Lazutkin wrote about his migration to magic-removal. He includes some good pointers worth reading and says: "In general the whole process was painless and left me completely satisfied with the outcome and code changes."
• Trevor F. Smith: "Michael and I are coding a couple of small apps using the django web framework, which is built by people with the sensitivity to know what can and cannot be solved well in a framework and with the taste to leave out everything else."
• "Django is cool. Calling it "Rails for Python" does it a disservice."
• Chase Davis writes about an in-house Boston Globe project using Django: "Sure, I could write a PHP or ASP frontend, but coding all the validation conditions would take at least a couple tedious hours. With Django, I’ll have this thing up and running in 10 minutes, validation and all. Less time developing boring applications = more time working on fun projects. For database-driven applications, data-entry forms and general information accessibility, Django takes the prize for speed and simplicity."
• As seen on Jacob's weblog: Eric Walstad posted a J2EE-to-Django success story to the django-users mailing list. He went from 40,000 lines of Java/JSP (without unit tests or documentation) to 25,000 lines of Python/Django templates (complete with docstrings and unit tests). Says Eric: "All things considered, this app has been a huge success for me, my team and our clients. Three cheers for Python and Django!"

Posted by Adrian Holovaty on May 7, 2006