Django weekly roundup: August 6

Starting with this week I've begun formatting this report a bit differently. The order of these sections are quite arbitrary and may change from week-to-week as I find out which work out on a consistent basis. Feel free to comment on the new format in the comments below.

• Helpful articles and links:
  • Michael Trier has written a lengthy article on his blog detailing some of the common issues people run into with Django’s syndication framework. He then describes a process you can follow to successfully get your feeds up and running.
  • Digging through items in del.icio.us tagged with ‘django’, I ran across this nifty Google search that returns a listing of all Google Code projects with ‘django’ in the title. Of course, I found a lot of known projects, but it was interesting to see all the others that don’t get publicized as often.
• Code snippets and projects:
  • Last week we let everyone know that James Tauber had begun his work on fully fleshing out Atom support in Django. Less than a week later and James has completed his work. Check out James’ implementation of RFC 4287 for Django at its Google Code repository.
  • A newcomer to the Django community known only as ‘mamcx’ has begun the work necessary to complete the MSSQL backend. This backend had been left in a state of disarray as its original maintainers lost interest and the core of Django evolved over the past few years. Mamcx has already put in considerable work, but is somewhat new to Python and Django, so any assistance would obviously be much appreciated! Check out [5062] for his patches and comments.
  • Here’s a method of defining a set of URLs in your Django project that will never get cached.
  • Derek Willis has implemented iCal feeds in his Django application and written a subsequent post detailing how you can do it too. Using the excellent vObject library in tandem with Django (and applying a few idiosyncratic tweaks to make IE/Outlook happy) is very simple and eliminates the need for the developer (i.e. you) to develop any iCal templates!
  • Bradley Whittington has a series of posts on his blog that detail his development of a Django middleware to log statistics about users to a database. Part one details the construction of a data model to hold this information and how to log this information within a middleware component. Part two goes over one process by which you can aggregate this data in meaningful ways.
• New Django sites of note:
  • FrePPLe came to my attention through a user-submitted email. FrePPLe is a specialized application for production planning in the manufacturing industry. It was described to me thusly: “A first part of it is an extensible planning engine written in c++ (with bindings exposed in Python). The second part is the user interface and data persistence layer. For this I have become excited about django: Django’s flexible and efficient framework provides the ideal foundation. Also, the Django mindset and design principles match very well with the easy-to-extend, easy-to-customize and easy-to-use goals of my project.” Check out the screenshots of FrePPLe and see how they’ve put the Django admin interface to work in some interesting ways.
  • Splice is an web application that allows users to upload, edit, and mix their music, as well as connect musicians from all over the world. Not only is this a really cool idea for a web site, it has a great design, and it’s written in Django!

If you have any tips, project announcements, or generally interesting Django news, email me at clintecker+djangotips@gmail.com.

Posted by Clint Ecker on August 6, 2007