Python comes with batteries included, but sometimes, battery power is not enough. Thankfully, there are countless packages available for use. Given that there “should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it,” using Python packages can be quite intimidating. The documentation of your package might say to download, unzip und run python setup.py install. Meet distutils. Or just do easy_install MyPackage, which is uses setuptools. But then you hear that setuptools is superseeded by distribute and instead of easy_install, you should use pip. And then there is virtualenv, which is awesome, but can be even more awesome with virtualenvwrapper. What a mess!

My conclusion: use distribute, pip, virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper.

You can download the slides or view them with Slideshare:

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.

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.