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Closed 9 years ago.
There are many, many, many options out there, but I still couldn't settle with one. Ones that looks nice to me so far include wordpress getshopped, opencart and magento. But they all need to install and configure and try out for many different features, which I still don't even know if I'm going to need or not. That is the "solution" part of my question, since I'll also need a host able to handle it and, preferably, supporting the platform updates.
Features I do need are:
a ticket system (which opencart sure doesn't have built in), so I can customize a custom made product for instance, and;
a customizable user interface, as easy and as much as possible. In here I like to take squarespace as an example. Really easy to customize. In fact, it would be great if the shopping cart would offer similar drag n' drop features.
I don't care if it's .net, php, gae or python. Actually, that's about my reversed order of preference language-wise, python being preferred. I care a lot more if it's easy to support, modify and migrate if needed (of host, platform, database, whatever). Also I do want a way to try it out hassle free. Open source is always better but not necessarily best.
TLDR: What's the best shopping cart out there that can be used to sell services rather than products?
I just went through the process of installing and trying several carts for a project that I was working on. As Pierre says above, "There is no best shopping cart, however there is one best for your specific need" That is a very truthful statement.
My project was for an on line soap company that has 5 different categories with 5 or so variations each. Not a big store and not one that changes inventory often.
I tried the following carts: PrestaShop, Zen Cart, Magento, getshopped and phpurchase.
My findings were that for a small store, PrestaShop, Zen Cart and Magento are a bit overkill. For a small shop, getshopped and phpurchase are better fits.
Out of the 3 big shop solutions, I felt that Zen Cart is really hard to make look nice. It has a 90's vibe about the template that it comes with and takes a lot of work to get around that. Magento and PrestaShop were really cool. PrestaShop seems very UK specific. It did not take Authorize.net and I think that there may be a plugin that you can get. Magento seems like a great solution for a larger store and I liked the backend admin interface.
I purchased getshopped plugin and integrated it into my Wordpress site (I purchased the Authroize.net integration gold cart level) I had such trouble dealing with the multiple bugs that I found riddled through the code base. I looked at their forum and many people who had similar issues were not responded to. Alot of people were as frustrated as me. I tried customer support - no response. I asked for a refund, no response. Basically, Get Shopped was a complete waste of time and money.
I then found Phpurchase. The customer support person, Lee Blue was really nice - Lee answered my emails morning, noon and night. Lee is literally the nicest customer support person I've ever worked with! - so helpful. The code worked just as specced - no troubles and no complaints. I'm a very happy customer with phpurchase. If I need a small ecommerce site in the future, I will use that solution again, for sure.
Note, I'm not an affiliate of Phpurchase or have any type of financial gain by recommending them, I just had such a rough time with getShopped and such a wonderful experience with Phpurchase!
There is no one best pizza, best soda, best father, best website,...
There is no best shopping cart.
However, there is one best for your specific need.
To find it, testing them all is the only effective solution I know.
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Closed 7 years ago.
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I am writing this to get a more realistic view of what I should be able to achieve.
I have been learning web development for just about a month now. Below are my level of proficiency on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being not having to use google or ask a question on stackoverflow to solve all encountered issues)
Skills
Django: 5
jquery/ajax: 4.5 to 5
Html: 5
(just simple html code, having the "bone structure" of the site laid out without any fancy formatting or design)
using CSS: 0 (I think it's called css)
These are, from my understanding of the skills required to develop a site.
Am I a fast learner?
I started a month back at 0 in all categories (with limited to medium programming experience in other languages), I don't know if this counts as fast.
GOAL:
As a learning experience, I am trying to develop a news website where users subscribe to different news categories (ex: 'US news', 'Europe', 'Business'...) and they would get, in their news feed (a lot like facebook's news feed that automatically gets updated) feeds that are related to the categories they are subscribed to.
I haven't tackled website design yet; even though it is just for learning purposes, I would ultimately really like to have a nice design set up for the site, and deployed it on a server just so I would go through all the steps needed to actually launch a site.
I would really like to hear some feedback on feasibility/ get some insights on some of your personal professional experience on:
1- Hey is it feasible for a newbie to learn off the internet everything he needs to pull this off!!??
2- I am having a hard time putting a "deadline" to achieve this. How long will it take you to finish this? how long do you think it takes an almost complete novice to do this :)
Any other remarks/comments are welcome,
Thanks for sharing!!
-Rami
I think you may be over-rating your django skills a little there! I'd say someone is probably at 6/10, or 7, when they're relatively comfortable with the AOP parts of django - i.e. metaclasses, decorators, and so forth. That said, apologies if you are at this level!
I dare say what you'll find yourself doing is making the site so that it works - this won't take long at all - and then doing a ~huge re-write using more sophisticated code. And so on.
Another issue you may have with a dynamic site like this is database optimizations and, though not really applicable for a feeds-based site, caching. I'm currently working on doing optimizations on a large website, where the initial programmer didn't care about efficiency so long as it worked. So it became incredibly inefficient, some pages using 1000+ queries (though not bad code, at all, really) - some model methods potentially doing 50k+ queries (ouch!). Most optimizations were fairly trivial (select_related, annotate, aggregate, update, etc) - some were outside of the ORM's scope and required raw SQL and/or efficient c-based algorithms. The latter have sped some pages up from ~700queries/7seconds to 3queries in 0.4seconds - impossible to do in just django.
All in all, how long it'll take to make the website depends on your audience. If its for <100 users, then it won't take you long at all (apart from the design, I could spend years playing with css and my site would still look ugly) - if its intended for a much larger user-base, then you could be spending a lot longer on it... in my opinion!
1- Hey is it feasible for a newbie to
learn everything he needs of the
internet and pull this off!!??
Completely! The information is all there. Django is an extremely well documented framework. You might have to use the brain for specific actions but most of it already exists in the framework or by using plugins. The rest you already know. As for the CSS part, get a theme from some online site and adapt it to your needs. Keep backups to revert to in case you destroy something.
2- I am having a hard time putting a
"deadline" to achieve this. How long
will it take you to finish this? how
long do you think it takes an almost
complete novice to do this :)
Can't help you there.. No one works the same way and that will be based on your experience, knowledge, background and so on. Start doing it and adapt as you go.
Good luck!
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Closed 10 years ago.
Can anyone suggest a good open source django project to learn django development.
A great resource is www.djangopackages.com, which lists a lot of the notable Django apps out there, including links to their respective repos, popularity ratings, etc..
Another way to find popular projects is directly on GitHub: https://github.com/search?q=django
Finally:
Awesome Django # https://github.com/wsvincent/awesome-django
Awesome Python # https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python
django-basic-apps is also a very good start to learn django and reusable apps. These apps are simple enough and code is well written.
If you're looking to learn the popular reusable app feature of Django I would suggest Pinax, and you also may want to look at Django-Mingus. I'm the author behind Mingus and I recently posted a list of the apps included in Mingus along with a description of how and why they are used. It maybe helpful in finding some projects you may want to use yourself. Here's a link: "The apps that power Django-Mingus"
There's also a ton of Django projects on Google Code, GitHub, and BitBucket. Just search for "django".
Django-CMS, mentioned above, and Fein-CMS are both good CMS projects to dive into, and the screencasts by Eric are terrific - I absolutely suggest any noob to Django watch all 13 of those screencasts.
I asked Malcolm Tredinnick a few weeks ago if there was a project he admired and he suggested Django Packages. They keep their source on Github .
I wouldn't say that it should be used as a Django tutorial but they have an admirable style of programming and I have picked up more than a few tips and tricks by reading their source. It is definitely a good example to learn from.
One of the best for newbie: 13 screencasts "Django From the Ground Up" at This Week In Django#
edit:
#the website is closed. view archived page.
I recommend Waka Waka. Its a very well written wiki, that should give you a good idea of how to develop in django. It is an application used by Pinax, which by itself should be huge, to learn.
You can also of course go through some of ubernostrum's code like Registration, profiles and Contact Form, which are a standard in the django world. But as some of them involve dynamic forms, it may be best to get to it, after a little actual coding.
If you're interested in running Django in App Engine, checkout out this project. Here's a demo.
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Closed 11 years ago.
What sequence of events made Django the most popular Python web framework .. and still so? Even though several other frameworks exist.
Note: This question is neither argumentative nor confrontational. I merely asked for (objective) "the sequence of events" that lead to its actual popularity. Being aware of the dynamics of software acceptance, I am not intending anyone to get into arguments over technical superiority.
Many Python web frameworks already existed when Django appeared in 2005 -- indeed, the joke was already going around, by then, that Python is "the language with more web frameworks than keywords" (and Guido rejected my proposal to fix that in Py3k by adding many, many more keywords). Now "django" per se is a bit ambiguous as a search term (it's also the name of a popular guitar player whose life inspired a Woody Allen movie, etc, etc), nevertheless adding "python" to the search to remove those other meanings you can see e.g. in this graph how its relative popularity changed in comparison to another classic Python web framework, Zope. Mostly steady growth quarter over quarter, with a huge surprising jump up at the start of Q2 2008... which just happens to coincide with the date in which Google announced App Engine (it's impossible to prove causation in such case, but the coincidence is at least interesting;-).
App Engine essentially rules out any Python web framework that deeply depends on custom C-coded components, or intrinsically require "heavily relational" functionality; out of those that run well with just pure Python code, Django is probably the one that App Engine most directly and visibly supports. However, this was just a boost, adding to Django's underlying healthy growth trend. The explanation for that trend (and indeed for App Engine team and users' decision to support Django so well) must lie in characteristics that are intrinsic to Django itself.
Django is sometimes criticized (including by... yours truly;-) for being "too magical" or "too monolithic", compared to alternatives such as Pylons, TurboGears, Werkzeug, &c, which are lighter-weight (esp. the latter, my favorite;-), more transparent, and allow easier swapping in and out of specific components (ORM, templating, &c). However, Django's popularity tells us that, for most people interested in developing server-side web sites and apps, these Django design choices are perceived positively: Django's seen as a very rich and well integrated framework (and it does have a lot of add-ons and contributed "plugins", but those are more a consequence than a cause of its ascendancy).
Ease of getting started, automagical "admin pages", and the like -- as well as the fact that Django can be bent to make really rich and complex sites/apps and accommodate peculiar or unique requirements, with much skill and some work -- are probably the "killer features". To use Werkzeug at its best, you need to understand HTTP, and WSGI, and pick and integrate your favorite storage and templating -- developers of Python-based web sites and apps (like, in a sense, users of Rails, or users of even-more-popular PHP!-) are "voting with their mindshare" for an environment in which they need not necessarily do any of that, but can mostly focus on their application domain. I will have to admit that they probably do have a point;-).
I think there were a few factors, the combination of which was greater than the sum of their individual weights.
One is simply timing: Django appeared right as the first big wave of Rails hype was ramping up, and so it was immediately portrayed as being sort of "Python's answer to Rails". That resulted in a not-insignificant number of eyeballs on the project almost from the start. The fact that Adrian was at the "Snakes and Rubies" meetup in Chicago and got to take part in side-by-side talks about Rails and Django did a lot for that.
Another factor is that Django is and always has been a single-package install (well, not quite: you still need a database adapter, unless you're on Python 2.5+ and using SQLite, but close enough). The non-Zope alternatives, which all focused on leaving component choices in the developer's hands, required quite a bit more work just to get to the point where you could do a basic tutorial: you'd need to go hunting down an ORM, a template language, etc., etc. and get them all installed and configured. Though that's gotten much better over the years, I think the lingering memory of that still has an effect.
And Django came out of the gate with documentation that (if I may say so myself) was far above the usual standard for open-source projects, and has only gotten better over time. The tutorial, for all its many faults, hits on a number of the high points that make Django useful, and the remainder of the documentation has always been of good quality, mixing both API reference and important "how to" bits as needed. This produces a good out-of-the-box experience and helps with the post-tutorial learning curve (something which has always plagued Zope).
I also think there's a perception -- rightly or wrongly -- that, say, Pylons or Werkzeug really are better for experienced developers who already know their way around WSGI and the Python web ecosystem; the fact that they tend to be strong choices for taking your existing favorite libraries and plugging them together is the source of this, I think, and perhaps nudges some newer folks over toward Django's integrated approach. The flip side, of course, is that a lot of people who'd be better off learning more up-front before trying Django don't do that ;)
Finally, I think there's something to be said for the way Django's been marketed, which is to say that it really wasn't marketed for a long time, or at least not in the sense that, say, Rails was marketed. Until Django 1.0 landed, the "marketing" effort mostly consisted of people blogging (and there were some notable incidents where people were asked to tone it down a bit), talks at PyCon and then mostly just improving the framework, building cool things with it and letting the results speak for themselves. Now, of course, in the post-1.0 world we have the DSF and DjangoCon and business-oriented consultants doing training sessions and lots of books and all the rest, but that's all still quite new.
I expect that there will be a backlash, just as there's been with Rails, and in fact I think it's been brewing for a while and has already started. But up until now I think the factors I've listed here are at least the major ones behind the consistent, steady growth in popularity Django has seen since its initial release.
I can think of three reasons for Django's popularity, only one of which has been addressed in other answers as far as I see:
Documentation. It's well structured, comprehensive, and approachable from a number of skill levels.
Design. The visual design of the admin, error pages and the project site are far above the level of design seen with most open source projects.
Community support. Starting with the team at World Online, Django picked up some influencial evangelists early on. I'm not sure you can over state the importance of blog posts like Jeff Croft's Django for Non-Developers (I think that was the title).
"My personal favorite, and I expect that that will remain a personal favorite for a long time, is something named Django" - Guido Van Rossum on FLOSS weekly episode 11, aired aug 4th 2006
[Click Here] (listen to last third of the interview)
Think this might have helped? or at least the reason why Google chose it for AppEngine?
of course, the django community (including devs) are doing alot of things right. For example (Some analysis in the links):
Improving modularity:
[Click Here]
kick ass documentation
Click Here
There is also something about the community that gets people to want to contribute which I've yet to put my finger on:
Click Here
Of course, all that lead to Django being an outlier:
Click Here
There is no question about Django's popularity.
In my case, I'd bought the TurboGears book, and struggled through its inconsistencies and haphazard route to explaining things.
Then I got the Django book, and voila! My first for-pay project was created while working my way through the sample project in the book. That plus the online documentation sealed the deal.
For me, it was simple: Documentation, documentation, documentation.
I noticed that it often got promoted as being the Ruby on Rails equivalent in Python. It's also has a connection to Google (Google hosts Django events, and supports it in their App Engine). A web framework being endorsed by Google has to amount for something. :)
At least for me, an important factor was that Simon Willison and Adrian Holovaty were already well known players in the "Web Standards" scene, as well as Jeff Croft later.
That wasn't only a quality seal, but also made Django very web-friendly, with its respect for HTTP, markup, and even the quick and dirty, "print debugging" way of working that people coming from PHP were used to.
I might be heavily wrong here, no data to back this up, but I feel that Django gained a lot more traction from people coming from PHP, as opposed to Rails which got a lot of conversions from Java/.NET.
As others already noted, the documentation is way above average. The best I've seen, as far as I recall.
The fact that there were several high volume sites already using Django (i.e. lawrence.com etc...) - even by the 0.96 days - helped me convince management it was safe to use. Things like Pylons and Turbogears really did not have that.
As for Django's popularity over time (the literal meaning of your question title, if not quite your actual question), have a look at the google trend.
Not a programming question I'm afraid, so moderators do what you will, but it is a question specifically for self-employed programmers running their own ISV sites.
If you publish your own shareware or freeware, do you use any CMS or templating system to streamline maintaining the website? Would you recommend any?
Two most important features I'm looking for that I couldn't find in any popular CMS/blogging engine, from my favorite TextPattern to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are:
a templating system to maintain structural consistency of xhtml page layout
a hash table of user-defined values that works with the templates to substitute these values for identifiers.
Explanation: If you publish more than one application, the site probably contains several classes of pages that are nearly identical for each product: "Features", "Screenshots", "What's new", "Download", etc. These pages have the same layout and differ mainly in product-specific data. I'd like to be able to define "CurrentVersion=2.2" for product A, and "CurrentVersion=3.3" for product B in a "dictionary", and have the system generate two "Download" pages from the same template, replacing the "CurrentVersion" identifier with each product's respective value.
Other than that, I am looking for good support for static pages (the example pages above do not yield themselves to blog-like timeline treatment) and for design templates (themes), since I can't do graphic design at all (no skills, no tools, no talent). A good search function, esp. for the FAQs, is important. Another nice-to-have is easy (preferably wiki-like) way of linking to pages within the site. Some CMS-es, such as Joomla, make this simple and common task surprisingly inconvenient.
LAMP, and preferably free, since mine is a freeware-only shop.
I need no collaboration features and no multi-user content editing at all. My ISP doesn't support Zope, so that excludes some candidates.
I'm asking this question having spent months trying to find a solution that would help me leave static html behind and reduce the maintenance chores, such as updating the current version number on several pages manually. So what do others use to publish their software?
(Please do not reply by just saying "Try X". At least please say what makes it suitable or how it is better than other possible solutions. I've already tried a number of CMS engines, and they all seem to require extensive modifications to suit this particular need. Since my programming experience is strictly desktop-side Windows, tweaking these products is well beyond my skills (and my skin crawls to think of potential security WTFs I could unwittingly commit). Time is also a factor, since between my day job and my late-night coding, there's little left for learning how to write my own CMS from scratch - just typing static html would be more efficient.)
Wordpress is quite nice. It has a big community behind it so you can leech some plugins, like for SEO optimization, PayPal integration, Google Analytics statistics tracking, etc. And you also have a full-featured administration backend to manage all your content.
I would recommend Joomla 3.2.x. I have the same sort of project based websites, and this provides the flexibility for all of the different requirements. While WordPress is great the simplicity of it gets the better of it, Joomla is far more flexible and has a huge support network and extensions library.
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I am about to start a new project and would like to document its development in a very simple blog.
My requirements are:
self-hosted on my Gentoo-based LAMP stack (that seems to rule out blogger)
Integration in a django based website (as in www.myproject.com/about, www.myproject.com/blog etc rather than www.myproject.com and a totally different site at blog.myproject.com)
very little or no learning curve that's specific to the blog engine (don't want to learn an API just to blog, but having to get deeper into Django to be able to roll my own would be OK) According to the answers so far, there is a chance that this excludes Wordpress
Should I
a) install blog engine X (please specify X)
b) use django to hand-roll a way to post new entries and a page on my website to display the posts in descending chronological order
Install Wordpress. It is the most common engine for a reason. It's PHP but will play just fine in your environment.
If you're the perfectionist kind, roll your own.
It isn't that hard
You learn something useful
You'll get exactly what you want and need
Be warned that you may run into a quagmire fighting comment spam, fixing security holes, etc. But it'll probably be a fun project.
If you are the practical type and ready to face some integration pain, use an existing engine like WadcomBlog (Python) or PyBlosxom, or something completely different like MovableType or WordPress.
Here's a simple Django blog example to get you started.
Some pros and cons of rolling your blog engine this article by Phil Haack.
Jeff Croft apparently rolled his own as well.
I've tried WordPress recently and am very disappointed. As long as you don't want to customize anything, all is well. But imagine you want to install a plugin to handle Markdown editing. There the trouble begins. The plugin architecture of WordPress is seriously screwd up. In the case of Markdown, this means that no good solution exists. The existing plugin is a series of (quite well-documented) hacks that fall apart at a hard stare.
I never intended to write the least bit of code for WordPress but the last few days, I've been knee-deep in PHP the whole time, hacking plugins as well as the WordPress core in order to make it work for my special scenario (which really isn't all that special, I'm just a perfectionist). Which is a pity, because the documentation of WordPress is more than just patchy. I don't use it anymore, I grep for functions and read the source. All in all, one of the less enjoyable OpenSource projects.
You can spend hours if not days customizing Wordpress with plugins, themes, etc...
I would go with a 0 installation solution, such as blogger (https://www.blogger.com/start)
You can even use our own domain name with it if you need do.
EDIT: Plus, if you ever get slashdotted, digged or redditted, google can handle the traffic, your server probably can't.
For me, Wordpress is still the quickest & simplest to setup and get going. It can be extended to do pretty much anything or you can keep it real simple. Runs on PHP, but unless you want to write plugins for it, you never need to write code
Have a look at Blosxom. It's file-based, so no crufty database. The basic idea has been ported to different languages, pyblosxom is in Python.
I use PyBlosxom for my personal blog, and I think it is pretty useful if you need something minimalistic. The deployment is simple, as you need only the python runtime and cgi. You might want to have some basic knowledge of python at least if you are going to use it, though.
Have a look at Blosxom. It's file-based, so no crufty database. The basic idea has been ported to different languages, pyblosxom is in Python.
I wrote the engine for my personal blog in maybe 6 hours during one weekend, with comments, labels, simplified markup, sitemap, feeds and so on. It was great fun and I learned a lot of Django.
If you decide to go this way, look at generic views, this Django feature will save you much of work (and learn few useful tricks).
I Haven't tried it myself yet (other than the demo), but I've bookmarked Chyrp so that if I ever need to set up a quick & simple blog (kind of like you're describing) I could try this. So check it out, might be a good option for you.