After visiting this year’s awesome Pycon in Chicago I’m very looking forward to attend another major event of the Python community: Europython 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The flight and accommodation is surprisingly inexpensive, so if you are not sure about attending here are some other good reasons.
The call for participation went out in April and promises to bring us all a great conference. If you have a good idea for a talk or a lightning talk, want to be in touch with other developers of your favorite Python software in an open space or just like to hang out with nice people please consider participating. Since Europython is a community conference you decide what will happen!
Django sprint?
As you may know EuroPython is divided in a conference and a sprint part. Like other occasions in the past (like Pycon) I think there is a good chance we can hold a Django sprint if enough people join. And I think on the way to Django 1.0 it’s a good time to fix bugs, work on documentation, test edge cases, discuss new features, work on reusable apps and do other fantastic things with Django. We all have seen what the queryset-refactor brought us, so let’s meet to work on the rest of list.
If you are interested please leave a comment here or come to the #django-sprint IRC channel to discuss things further.
UPDATE
Yay, apparently Europython’s registration opened today!
Since version 3.56 Virtualmin Pro is slowly gaining support for Python based web applications because it includes an official install script for Django. This makes my version of a Django install script slightly unnecessary, even though the official version only supports stable releases (0.96.1) and not the SVN trunk (which we all know is quite common in Djangoland). Anyway, I think this is great news.
Other Python based web applications also benefit from the official Django install script of course because there are some helpful features in Virtualmin’s codebase now. Which brings us to:
Trac
Virtualmin already does a great job managing Subversion repositories for virtual servers but misses an install scripts for a web application that makes working with these repositories easier later in daily work. Since I really like Trac for its ease of use, powerful features and ubiquity in the developer scene I wrote an install script for it: trac.pl.
Just put it in /etc/webmin/virtual-server/scripts/ and go to the “Install script” section. Keep in mind that you need to create the repositories (important: with “Allow anonymous read access?” set to yes) and give the users the appropriate rights to access the SVN repositories before. The installation looks like the following image and results is this Trac installation: http://jannisleidel.com/trac/.
I used a server running Debian Etch and Virtualmin Pro 3.56 to build that and would love to hear what experience you have with it.
As a little side project I hacked together a Django and xmpppy based Jabber bot for Pownce. It’s implemented as a reusable Django app, using Django’s signal framework and database backend.
So, without further ado I present: pownce-jabber-bot
Please don’t hesitate to send feature requests, bug reports or become a project member!
See the Google Code project page for installation and setup instructions.
Currently available commands:
help COMMAND [...]message NOTE [RECEIVER]link URL [NOTE] [RECEIVER]register USERNAME PASSWORDunregister PASSWORD
Since many in the Django community have asked (me including) for t-shirts I’ve put together a shop at Spreadshirt. The printed logo is crisp and the quality of the shirts is quite ok. No, I don’t make any money with that :)
Feel free to visit the shop at django.spreadshirt.net!
UPDATE: I’ve added some girlie clothes to the shop though the product portfolio of Spreadshirt is biased towards boys. Hm.
UPDATE 2: Due to some strange reasons Spreadshirt runs its US business separately and offers a smaller set of customizable products. The American shop with fewer Django-affine products can be found at django.spreadshirt.com.
Click here to read more
To all whom it may concern: Some djangonauts from #django-de would like to meet informally at this year’s 24C3, the Chaos Communication Congress organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Berlin Germany, probably sometime on friday afternoon. Just drop us a line at IRC or leave a comment here. And stay tuned for more.
The setup and administration of a shared-hosting server is of course quite a topic. I don’t want to go into too much detail about that, because it’s beyond the scope of this tutorial. I assume you have a running Virtualmin (Pro) server and the need to enable each user to run Django in the shared environment of your root server.
Click here to read more
Despite yesterday’s bitter-sweet post I’m very proud to announce the availability of a new meeting point for all German-speaking Django developers and users: Django-de. We totally owe David Larlet and his pals of Django-fr a barrel of beer since most of Django-de’s backend comes from them. Meeting cool people during the Django sprint last weekend in Dresden and afterwards also speeded things up and got this community thing started.
Our first goal should be the translation of Django’s trunk documentation which becomes 1.0’s docs in the near future, just like django.es and django-fr.org are already doing. If you’d like to participate in the growing Django community, please hop over to Django-de and get in contact with us at the Django-de Google Group or #django-de at Freenode.
PS: I know, writing this post in English seems weird to me, too.
Dear Djangonauts,
I’m a little baffled right now and I guess you all have a lot to do, so please forgive me if I’m disturbing. Going back to the begin of the Google summer of code, my mentor James and I discussed the best strategy to start implementing reusable Django-apps and the so-called “Hotclub of France” conventions (e.g. a public web repository for reusable apps). Unfortunately, a real discussion did not really take off, neither on the discussion list nor on IRC.
It now seems to me as it could just be to early for Django to have such a repository. Everybody, including me, loves to fiddle with Django in some degree and is suspicious of automatic and ready-made products. After creating ticket #6080 I’m a little tired of bringing up the same arguments again and again on the net. That’s why I wanted to ask you, if you generally see a chance for this to come before Django 1.0 and how you handle this at your projects if at all.
Just a small script I got from python-nose.googlecode.com and modified to fix a strange NoneType bug: rst2wiki.py. All thanks to Jason H. Pellerin for this great script! Use it like this:
$ python rst2wiki.py < my_document.txt > my_document.wiki
To continue my last post about reusable Django apps, I’d like to talk about setuptools, show you a way to install Django by using setuptools and propose the reintroduction into Django’s code, even if setuptools have been dumped by the developers not long ago due to manageability reasons. Features like entry points, egg-files, the develop command, automatic versioning and tight integration with the Python Package Index make it worth installing.
Click here to read more
