Let's say I'm writing a complex site in django with wikis, forums, ... or writing my own apps that I intend to reuse from different sites.
I really want to create, for example, a wiki page that has a forum at the bottom, or reuse my previously written wiki app with a different graphical layout.
What is the best way to structure my app to allow this kind of reuse?
So far, I have been giving apps their own urls in urls.py. This however does not work if I want to combine multiple apps together in a single page.
Additionally, most of the apps I found online come with their own templates, which has the full html, and do not separate the logic of creating / preparing a context from that of handling a request and generating a reply.
What is the best practice here? What do you do? edit the templates that come from applications you download online? refactor them to fit in your application?
what should I do for my own applications? structure them so they have a method to get the context, and a method to render it?
Django hasn't great support out of the box to component-oriented architectures. I find this problematic some times too. You'll face to problems here.
Architecture
Code
Architecture: As Django is not component oriented, all the apps aren't component oriented neither. The designers and coders for those apps haven't thought about that. So they've just built "views" to interface with their apps. You'll need to get something more "pluggable".
Code: Once you decide to build that, you'll have to find what support you have for that. Most Django apps are pretty well coded, so you won't have much code in views, but abstracted in other places. That way you could reuse that code and build your own components.
Example: Suppose you're working with a third-party Wiki app. That wiki has a view to display highest ranked Tags and other view to create a wiki entry. If the code is good enough (that I'm assuming it is because Django has a pretty good community), you could refactor that to use components. The view to create an entry must be using some Form, that you can plug in your own site. And the view to get highest ranked tags probably uses some utility function, or some Tag manager's method. In that case you could refactor it to your own needs.
Hope it helps.
Related
I'm new to web development, but have recently been getting going with it pretty fast, using Django (which I'm falling in love with). However, while Django is easy to get going with and pick up quite fast, I'm afraid there are concepts I don't know much about, particularly REST and RESTful web services. I hear those terms thrown around a lot, and I'm assuming are important to modern web apps, and I want to know basically what they mean, when I should use them, and how I should use them (package, plugin, etc.).
My web app consists of the following functionality:
Discussion Board which I've implemented so far only using the model layer
Messaging which I've implemented so far only using the model layer
Payments (not yet implemented)
Calendar (not yet implemented)
And that's about it for now. When should I be thinking about REST within these functionalities?
You could get really in depth with the subject, but when I think of it, I think of the URLs your site will be providing. That, for me at least, is the simple way to think of a RESTful service. I also think it's a good way to get to grips with Django & it's generic views.
Taken your example there of a calendar. A RESTful approach to a calendar app, with django's generic views, might implement URLs like;
# ListView
/calendar
# DetailView for a given item in the calendar
/calendar/<id>
# UpdateView for an item
/calendar/<id>/update
# DeleteView for an item
/calendar/<id>/delete
Beyond that, REST requires you consider the HTTP methods in use, so you should then define what methods your URLs will accept in order to better control the interaction. Furthermore, if you were enforcing the HTTP method on each action, you could write a more generic view which didn't expose the /update or /delete URLs. But I'd consider that a more advanced approach & you may wish to start from a more explicit design.
Once you start to write a consistent structure for your apps then you can easily make generic functions, and expand.
There is a whole load of things you could read on this subject, depending on where you see it going.
If you're thinking of building something that can provide an API then there's already a Django framework for this; http://www.django-rest-framework.org/
But if you're getting started & just want to know more about the concepts, Wikipedia is always a good place to look, and finally this looks like a great example for this subject using Django which should hopefully help you on your way.
To understand the idea of a resource, take a look at this answer
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At the moment we are running few smaller PHP sites (small company, private, non-profit org, friends...) and would like to migrate them to Python in order to be able to tweak them more easily and/or extend their functionality due to being familiar with Python although without real experience using some of the Python frameworks.
In order not to write everything from the scratch, we'd need decent CMS, blog and some e-commerce module.
We did some research, installed and tried few apps in Django world and so far have arrived to the two possibilities:
Django-CMS as CMS, Zinnia as blog engine and Django shop as e-commerce or
Mezzanine which integrates CMS+blog and Cartridge as shopping cart application.
Both combinations are nice, although not perfect...At the moment there is problem integrating released versions of django-cms & zinnia due to their usage of non-compatible versions of django-mptt or e.g. Mezzanine is missing some features like linkback support in blog etc.
While playing with the above two sets of apps, we heard about Web2py and must say that we like lot of things there...
We are aware it's younger project with smaller community, less apps etc., but wonder if there is some set of web2py applications which can compare with the two above-mentioned Django sets so that we can choose to start with Web2py, learn it and in that process replace PHP sites with it?
So, we would like to have some capable CMS+blog with the following features:
tag cloud, categories
spam protection
RSS feeds
multiple authors
threaded comments (optional)
linkback (pingback/trackback) support
(easily) theme-able
markdown/reST markup for writing content/posting
multi-lingual support
As far as e-commerce is concerned, besides easy integration with CMS+blog apps we do not need anything spectacular - our 'company' is selling 'services', so no need for thousands of products (only 10s of them), no complicated shipping options so something like:
multi-lingual support
basic infrastructure for payment methods (e.g.) PayPal and we would need to write a custom module for form-based API
simple shopping cart able to handle simple product descriptions
tax calculations and
(optional) PDF support
would be everything what we would need.
Considering the features we would like to have, our (non)experience working with any framework, which one - Django or Web2py - you consider is more suitable in terms of ease of learning, ease of use, application support etc. ?
I've sent two posts to web2py list and (maybe) because my query was not specific-enough (or some other reason) I did not receive any reply there and I saw there are some apps like KPAX CMS which looks old/non-maintained. Otoh, there is Powerpack which incorporates Instant Press but I'm not sure about availability of e-commerce component. Finally, I've found out about plugin_wiki which seems to be new/young app, but, considering we found* out about possibilities in Django-world, we would like to learn about the situation on the Web2py scene in order to be able to evaluate both options better.
p.s. it would be nice if Appliances list would be organized a bit better so that it's easy to find out what is maintained, where is project page etc.
I've had a lot of success with Django-CMS. It's very, very easy to write custom content-type plugins, extend menu nodes with custom nav elements, such as a list of product categories, etc. It's dead-simple to hook custom application code to any page in the navigation hierarchy.
As you mentioned in your question, Zinnia also plugs into Django-CMS for a nice blogging solution that is also extensible. Adding a cart app, whether it's from the DIVIO team or not should be an easy task.
Django, DjangoCMS and Python in general, have very low learning curves in my opinion. In 14 years of development, Django is the only web framework that hasn't gotten in my way, and Python is an absolute pleasure to work with on a daily basis.
I think you'll find that the Django ecosystem is much more holistic than any of the other Python frameworks, it's also very, very well documented and there are literally hundreds of 3rd party apps. Plus, Django admin can potentially save you many weeks of dev time, and you can override, skin and extend it to do just about anything.
My $0.02 :)
-- EDIT --+
Yeah, right after I posted I realized I was heavy on comparison of frameworks but light on suggested solutions to your problem (i.e. existing appliances). I think that Django probably has more matured addins/apps. That being said, crafting your own blog in web2py (a simple blog) is probably only a little harder than configuring one for another framework.
There is the wordpressclone appliance: http://web2py.com/appliances/default/show/36
(you can extract existing wordpress data and get it in here, i'm pretty sure there's a WP export and an import function on this appliance)
There is an e-store (haven't used it): http://web2py.com/appliances/default/show/24
There is KPax CMS, as you said, but i think this one might be out of date, unless it was updated recently. The integration between these should be possible, you can share sessions across apps and I think if you have the same auth_user db, it should work.
I would try installing these and see if they are close to meeting your needs -- especially KPax since I'm not sure the state it's in.
-- END EDIT --
Both Django and Web2py are very good frameworks in my opinion. I think you would be happy with either. That being said, having not used frameworks I would say to with web2py, unless you NEED certain modules that only exist in the django world. Web2py probably has a little more gradual learning curve. Also, it can do RSS out of the box, there's a screencast somewhere showing how to create a blog app in about 5 minutes (including comments), and the community is (usually) very responsive. I don't think there is anything that web2py can do that django can't (except DB migrations -- but i think you can make django do them with some 3rd party code), or vice versa.
Django favors a "explicit is better than implicit" development methodology, which requires to you import various modules and doesn't have all the "magic" of web2py. Using django, you will be more aware of exactly what is going on under the hood. The django templating language is easy to learn and provides a lot of functionality for common markup tasks. Their is a LOT of documentation, a larger user-base and tons of 3rd party modules/plugins/whatever.
Web2py favors a "everything should have a default" approach, and enables to to focus on the big picture without getting bogged down by the minutia of web development. I'm not saying this is in contrast to django, but rather that web2py is very strong on this point. It allows you to rapidly develop applications, and takes the headache out of things like updating a table schema (i.e. it does database migrations). I also prefer web2py's templating language to django's, as it allows pure python and does not require one to learn a separate templating language at all.
I think both frameworks have decent internationalization/localization features. I'm not sure if Django's is still under development or not? Web2py's is easy to use, but I think you might have to provide a lot of the translations yourself.
As for the lack of replies on the web2py list, maybe it's because this topic is becoming more and more frequent? I'm not sure. You could ask people on the web2py freenode channel.
Also, definitely check out this link:
Django vs web2py for a beginner developer
The first response is from the lead developer of web2py, but I think he makes a fairly balanced comparison.
Also, the previous thread includes a link to here (the good and bad of web2py):
http://www.mengu.net/post/django-vs-web2py
web2py is a great framework, but currently light on reusable CMS, blog, and particularly e-commerce applications. It sounds like you have already stumbled upon the main options -- plugin_wiki, Powerpack, and Instant Press.
I don't think there is a mature and currently maintained e-commerce application, but you may be able to make use of web2py-estore. There are also some options for accepting credit card payments (see also).
plugin_wiki includes comment functionality, and there is also plugin_comments. For PDFs, pyfpdf comes with web2py, and there is also web2py_appreport. web2py also includes RSS support.
EDIT: Also, another web2py CMS under development, to be released soon: SimplrCMS
I am a computer programmer by training but have been away from web development for a while. I am doing a little bit of background research on various Python web development frameworks. I understand that Django, Grok / Zope 3, and Pylons are all good solid frameworks, but have little in the way of background working with them. Can someone explain to me the difference in approach of the each of the frameworks, and where one shines when compared to the others?
My specific use case is in building a web application that will recommend products to users based on a variety of user supplied information. Thus, it will take a fair bit of user input in the shape of a basic profile, product preferences, attempt to establish social relationships between users. It will also need to support staff uploading products into the system with labeled features that can be then matched to users.
On the last point, would parts of Plone help with providing an interface for non-tech people to upload products and descriptions of the products? Are piece of Plone easy to borrow? Seems like I shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of having a way for people to upload items for sale / recommendation along with some metadata to describe the items. Thanks for the help.
Based on your background and requirements, I'd advise you to go with something like http://pinaxproject.com/ which is based on Django.
Pyramid (the successor to Pylons) is a very low-level framework and you need to either choose the libraries or write all your application code yourself. For someone experienced this makes sense and gives you full control over your code. But it is a bit of a hurdle if you start from scratch and aren't familiar with the available libraries.
Django and Grok are both high level frameworks, with Django being the more popular choice. If you aren't familiar yet with using object databases or URL traversal, Grok is more time consuming to learn.
Plone is not suited for your use-case. It's a content management system and not a general web framework. Very little of the libraries it uses can be reused in a different context, certainly none of its UI. If you want to provide an engaging user experience with personalized content, Plone isn't for you - that's not what its been build to handle.
Disclaimer: I'm a release manager for Plone and Zope 2 / Zope Toolkit and have used Pyramid but not Django.
Dolmen project is a CMS built on top of Grok. Is very simple, but there are very few that use it. If you go with Grok, you could be able to reuse the GUI.
But As Hanno said, Grok is more time-consuming to learn than Django. Also Django has far more users than Grok.
The advantage of using Grok is that you can profit from Zope Component Architecture almost without writing ZCML and using decorators instead.
With Pyramid/Pylons you get a very simple framework and nothing else. It is a decoupled framework, so you are free to use whatever templating enginge you want (Mako, Genshi, Jinja, Cheetah), you are free to choose sqlalchemy, zodb, mongoDb, etc., and you are also free to choose the url mapping scheme (traversal vs. django-style mapping or a combination of both). You can also use ZCA here if you want. For starters this might become quite confusing or verbose.
Django is a kind of monolithic framework that gives you one way to do stuff. That's why it's easy to learn and a very good option. But, in my experience, you sometimes get to a point where you want to deviate from Django standards and it simply cannot be done without patching a bunch of stuff.
And, as for Zope3, I'd recommend you to download a copy of BlueBream and se how it does for you.
As a Plone user I can say that creating Content Objects in Plone is difficult. There is not much documentation on how to do it and it is complicated. Some recommend using UML and specialized Plone products to make it easier but that introduces yet another dependency.
I mention the problem with content objects because your "products" (not the same as a Plone product) would probably be represented in Plone as a content object which you would need to write yourself.
Plone is best when users and editors are entering and approving text in the form of news articles, press releases, photos etc. When that is the use case there are predefined content objects for such things so one does not need to write them oneself.
--Jonathan Mark
What is a good django open source app that I can learn from? Something that follows best practices, and covers the majority of features and isn't overly complicated?
This would depend on your current level of knowledge of python and django.
If you are just starting to use django, I suggest you take a look in django documentation. It is well specified and clear. If you have some project in mind, start working on it while looking up for best practices about specific parts. For python coding style try to follow the pep 8 style guide.
If you already have done some work with django there are many sites lie these:
http://djangopackages.com/categories/apps/
http://www.django-apps.com/
What I do nowdays is look into django contrib apps (admin, auth, comments, flatpages), which are built based on the rest of django. This gives the best ways on how to write my apps.
Following the django comments framework (object independent), I am working on an app django-valuate (object independent attachment of ratings, likebuttons etc. through template tags)
These are some of my views. I have also starred this question, as I would like to know about some different perspectives and if mine are sound.
I've found djangobb (www.djangobb.org) to be a complete application, production quality and relatively simple. I use it as a base for my application which has nothing to do with forums and bb.
cloc output: only 3000 lines of python code in 30 files, another 2900 lines of templates html
I do not think there would be any one specific app that would cover all/most features of Django since the concept of the Django app itself is to perform specific/related functionality.
Having said that, a popular Django app is django-registration. Its popularity stems from the obvious requirement of most webapps to have User authentication and also its extremely easy to integrate with a Django project.
The best approach perhaps would be to keep trying the tons of open source Django apps available on the net. You can browse through http://www.djangopackages.com/ and http://www.django-apps.com/ to start getting your hands dirty.
snipt.net, a code sharing site:
https://github.com/lionburger/snipt
Review Board, a code review web app
https://github.com/reviewboard/reviewboard/tree/master/reviewboard
rietveld, another code review on app engine, by GVR himself. You need to know a bit of Django before digging into this source code since the Django models don't work on App Engine, GAE db model is used instead.
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk
First, some background information... I'm coming up on a medium-scale website for a non-profit that will require both English and Korean translations. Feature-set includes: CMS for normal content, a blog, some form submission/handling (including CSV/PDF exports), a job posting board, a directory of related businesses and non-profits (that accepts visitor submissions), and a basic (probably blog-driven) newsroom.
I have a fairly strong development background, and I've done some sites using Drupal, built some basic custom CMSes using frameworks like CodeIgniter, and I've recently started getting into Django. These are the primary options that I am exploring, and I would consider using different tools for different portions of the project, but what I'm mainly interested in, is if anyone has any experience to share with regards to localization/internationalization. I haven't yet put together a site that supports multiple languages, so before I get in trouble by underestimating the task, or making poor assumptions, I'd like to get some input to help guide my decision-making process.
Do you have any recommendations for frameworks (Drupal, Django, CodeIgniter) that handle localization/internationalization/translation well for a CMS? I know they all support it, but I'm looking for real-world experience here (or suggestions for modules/plugins given explanations).
Sorry for the longwinded question, but I wanted to be clear as possible. Thanks in advance!
There is a distinction between "site" translation and content translation. Django handles the site translation great, out of the box. The content translation, however, requires making some decisions (there's no one right way at this point). This probably makes sense, because of the very nature of Django as a lower level framework (when compared to something like Drupal, which is intended to serve as a complete CMS).
There are applications for Django which are meant to add this functionality (in the form of translations configured at the model level):
Django-multilingual
Transmeta
Also, I found this question that is related.
The bottom line though, is that this is still being explored in the Django world, and neither approach has been decided upon for the framework. Also, although I haven't used it, Drupal has module support for this in the form of the i18n module.
I will update with more conclusions as I come to them. If you have anything to add about content translation in Django or in Drupal, feel free to add your own answer as well.
You probably already know that the native i18n support in django is quite good. As for translation, you might try the django-rosetta app which allows you to grant translation rights to a subset of users, who are then able to translate through an admin-like interface.
Zend_Translate is pretty comprehensive. And if you decide to use PHP, I suggest you take a look at it. It provides multiple interfaces (e.g. an Array, CSV, Gettext, etc.) to manage your translations, which makes it IMHO unmatched when it comes to PHP.
I'm not sure how well it plays with Drupal, since Drupal is hardly a framework but more a CMS -- or maybe a CMS framework. I'm pretty sure that Drupal either has a thing build in or that there is a plugin for it.
With CodeIgniter you would start from scratch and Zend_Translate plays well with it.
I liked Drupal over Joomla. You should also look into DotNetNuke, out of the box it has lot of things that will meet your needs.
Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!