If you use Django’s admin application, you’re familiar with its “Recent Actions” sidebar. It gives a simple summary of your latest edits, including clickable links to the relevant objects (not any ones you deleted, naturally, but ones you added or changed).
It’s probably not something you look at very often, unless you do such intensive work in the admin that you lose track of things.
Django stores that log data (via the admin’s LogEntry model) for all admin users, a fact which has caused me to repeatedly daydream about writing a custom view or two to display it.
“I’m a PHP programmer and I want to check out this Django thing. What should I do?”
I’ve been seeing this kind of question pop up more and more, and I have a few answers.
First-hand experience as well as many conversations with developers online have led me to the same conclusion: the curious person behind such a question should be encouraged and assisted. (I’ll call that person “Pat” for the rest of the post, for convenience and conscientious gender-neutrality.
I just filed a ticket with the Google AppEngine project requesting the source to GoogleAppEngineLauncher, with the idea that this would make a very cool Django developer’s aid on OS X – much like Locomotive for Rails. Anybody else interested in this should go star it:
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=386 Update: Cool. In less than 24 hours, 38 people have starred the issue, making it the 31st most-requested item and rising – ahead of hot numbers like “Please add Tcl support”.
At the Western Mass. Developers Group meeting this week I showed a few people some of the unixy fun you can have with a (jailbroken) iPod touch and the Cydia package manager. Cydia is a port of Debian’s APT system to the iPhone platform – i.e. it’s a real package manager. It made it a snap to install Python, Mobile Terminal, Mobile Text Edit, Subversion, etc.
This is the toolset that has allowed me to even do some work on the book as I mentioned in my last post.
This has been going around – give people a peek at what commands you run most often. I ran this on my server, where I spend most of my shell time:
> history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
103 hg
81 cd
67 ll
29 ./manage.py
23 ab
21 re-ap
17 hgup
14 svn
13 cat
12 ls
Notes:
Mercurial has pushed my use of Subversion way down. I can’t remember what I was benchmarking with ab, but I’m sure it’s faster now!
Update: As of 2012, the primary Django repo is on GitHub. The mirror described in this post has been retired. I really enjoyed my participation in the last Django sprint, but prior commitments prevent me from participating in the PyCon Django sprint that begins today. On the chance that people may be taking advantage of my Mercurial mirror of the Django repository, I made a couple tweaks:
Increased the update frequency from hourly to every 15 minutes Added downloadable gzipped tarballs (about 2.
Just in time for Pycon, material from our new book is now available on the Safari “Rough Cuts” service. If you’re a Safari subscriber, or decide to become one to get access to our draft chapters, please check it out and let us know what you think! Reader comments are incredibly important to us.
We have a title now – Python Web Development with Django – and we’re even listed on Amazon.