Soft launch

I quietly launched my first production Django site today, a replacement for a mess of legacy third-party PHP code. Unfortunately, it’s a members-only service related to my job and so I don’t have a public URL to share.

A couple interesting points: the new site was developed alongside the still-live legacy PHP apps, using some of the same data – including a user table that’s used for authentication. django-admin.py inspectdb made model creation fairly easy. I also found Scott Hurring’s PHPSerialize module indispensible for working with the highly crufty legacy data.

This seems like a good time to thank all the authors and contributors to Django, as well as the folks who have answered my questions on IRC and the people who have taken the time to write up their experiences in technical detail.

It was a lot of work, and frankly I could have knocked out a PHP version in much less time. But I wanted to set the stage for cleaner, saner development in the future. I only expect to get faster.

More to come – some of it open to the public, even.

radek commented on Fri Jan 20 11:37:04 2006:

Willing to share some experience with the transition?

Paul commented on Fri Jan 20 12:52:48 2006:

Do you mean details on using the legacy data, or more general comments?