Tag Archives: Django

Slides from EuroDjangoCon

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These are the slides and code of talks given at the EuroDjangoCon, which is held in Prague from May 4th to May 6th. This information can also be found in the EuroDjangoCon Wiki.

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Other:

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

Building a site with Django? Start with Pinax!

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Some time ago, I watched James Tauber’s talk at DjangoCon about Pinax, a collection of re-usable Django applications. If you are thinking of a collection as a bunch of apps carelessly thrown together, you could not be more mistaken. Pinax is the foundation for a complete social networking site which covers most features you can imagine, the whole nine yards.

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.

Dynamic paths for lazy people

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Once your Django project has to run on multiple machines, the absolute paths in settings.py will drive you nuts.

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')

Pitfalls in Django unittests

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I’m currently rewriting dwidder [1] and I just spent way to much time on a unit test for the registration view. These are the things that made me stumble:

  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 to make it work as expected, you have to import the mail module. If you import the outbox directly, it will always be empty.

[1] a now defunct site where you could tweet by sending an SMS to a German mobile phone number