This little script creates short aliases for all available Django management commands. Typing this every time you want to work on your project obviously defeats the point, so I added it to bin/activate which is created by virtualenv (you do use virtualenv, don’t you?). I actually do this in a bootstrap script, using this snippet:

If you use virtualenvwrapper, you can append the script to the bin/postactivate script instead.

I know there is bash completion for Django management commands. The advantage of my solution is that it is available for every developer on the project after running the bootstrap script. And it is one character less to type.

To run django-admin.py syncdb, just type djsy<TAB> instead of dj<TAB>sy<TAB>.

TemplateSyntaxError at /

Caught VariableDoesNotExist while rendering: Failed lookup for key [request] in...

you are probably using a template tag that requires the request context processor. Simply add ‘django.core.context_processors.request’ to the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS tuple in your settings file.

Day 1:

• Zed Shaw (@zedshaw): Opening Keynote
• James Tauber (@jtauber): Django Patterns [PDF]
• Andrew Godwin (@andrewgodwin): Migrations: whywhyhowwho?
• Paul Smith (@paulsmith): The web map stack on Django
• Justin Lilly (@justinlilly): Django @ 30.000 feet
• Simon Willison (@simonw): Django Heresies

Day 2:

• Honza Kral (@HonzaKral): Model Aware Validation
• Mike Malone (@mjmalone): Scaling Django Web Apps [PDF] + Code on Github
  
• Eric Holscher (@ericholscher): Django Testing
• Peter Baumgartner, Michael Trythall (@LincolnLoop): Customizing the Django Admin [PDF]
• Alex Gaynor (@alex_gaynor): Forms, Getting Your Money’s Worth
• Joe Stump (@joestump) Rethinking the Stack

Day 3:

• Franz Wierzbicki (@fwierzbicki): Django on Jython
• David Larlet (@davidbgk): State of the art and future of Semantic stuff in Django (panel)
• Leah Culver (@leahculver): The Next Big Thing
• James Tauber (@jtauber): State of Pinax
• Joe Stump (@joestump): Working with large data sets
• Andy Smith (@termie): Migrating from LAMP to App Engine

Other:

• Mindmap summaries by @dibau_naum_h
• Lightning talks

This post will be updated over time. Please leave a comment if you think something is missing.

Forget django-admin.py startproject! Just do cp pinax myproject, remove some stuff you don’t need, adjust the templates and you are done!

Ok, I might be exagerating a bit, but watch the talk to build your own opinion.

A suggested solution to enhance portability (in German) is to define a PROJECT_ROOT.

import os
PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.dirname(__file__)

And then define absolute paths like this:

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'site_media')
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'templates'),
)

The downside is, typing os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT,'foo') twice over and over again, will probably incur the wrath of the DRY gods. But don’t despair, we can do better:

import os
PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.dirname(__file__)
p = lambda *x: os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT,*x)

Use it like this:

MEDIA_ROOT = p('static')
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    p('templates'),
)
MY_NESTED_PATH = p('x','y')

1. Write fixtures. Unit tests run on an empty database. Somewhere deep in your code might be a reference to one of the default applications, like django.contrib.sites, which will fail, because there is no default site object in your database.
2. Don’t subclass unittest.TestCase. Use Django’s TestCase class instead. Otherwise you will miss all the fancy stuff, like automatic fixture loading.
3. Import mail, not outbox. Django provides a dummy email outbox. But it to make it work as expected, you have to import the mail module. If you import the outbox directly, it will always be empty.