In continuing the rebuild of LinuxLaboratory.org using Django, I’m happy to say that things have moved fairly smoothly. I’m using a good mix at this point of stuff from the 2nd edition of “Practical Django Projects”, the Django documentation, blog posts, and docs from other apps I’m making use of.
RSS
I said in one of my previous posts that I’d wait until I burned my feed before giving out the link, and I just did that, so if you want to subscribe to the LinuxLaboratory Blog feed, here’s the link to do that. Right now there’s just one feed for all of the blog entries, but since I post almost all of my really geeky stuff here, the LLO Blog will be mostly site updates like new articles, code, or features being added. The LLO Blog isn’t something that’s intended to get tons of traffic or have tons of posts all the time. The meat of the site will be the content management system which houses articles, and the “Snippets” area which will house scripts and hacks and stuff.
The “Home” Link in Django
I’m not sure why, but it took me a little time to figure out how to link to the base site in a Django template. I had some URL routing set up such that, well… here’s what I have:
In the main project’s urls.py:
(r'^$', include('monk.urls.entries'))
I named my blog app “monk”, after Thelonius Monk. There’s actually a reason I picked his name for a blog app, but it’s not important right now (though, for a chuckle, I picked his last name because his first name breaks a long-standing “8 character” tradition in UNIX).
Anyway, in the corresponding URLConf in monk, I have:
(r'^$', 'archive_index', entry_latest_dict, 'monk_entry_archive_index')
And then in one of my base templates I had this (which is perfectly valid code):
<a href="{% url 'monk_entry_archive_index'}">LinuxLaboratory.org</a>
The ‘{% url %}’ tag can take a URLConf name as an argument, and it’ll do a reverse lookup to get the URL, which is nice, except that this would always land people at “http://linuxlaboratory.org/weblog”, and I wanted them to just go to the base URL for the site. The canonical home page. The root URL. Whatever you want to call it.
There are multiple ways to link back to the base domain from within a template, but I’m not sure if there’s a canonical, “Django-sanctioned” method. You can just make an href pointing to “/”, you can hard-code the whole URL, and I found that doing “href={{ settings.SITE_ID }}” also worked just fine. I tried that last one after discovering that the base URL for the site isn’t in settings.py, and reading that SITE_ID was used by some applications to help them figure out their own URL routing. SITE_ID is a numeric value that represents, according to the Django docs, “the current site in the django_site database table”.
That’s a little confusing, but if you just have a look at the table, it starts to become clear how this could work:
mysql> select * from django_site; +----+---------------------+---------------------+ | id | domain | name | +----+---------------------+---------------------+ | 1 | linuxlaboratory.org | linuxlaboratory.org | +----+---------------------+---------------------+
It seems logical that using {{ settings.SITE_ID }} in a template could cause the right things to happen, but I haven’t gone diving into the source code I’d need to to prove that it does.
What’s the canonical way of doing this?
Up Next…
So, I have what I think will be a decent setup for code sharing (complete with highlighted syntax), a solid foundation for a blog app, and I’m working on the content management system. I’m using TinyMCE in the admin interface to edit blog posts as well as the CMS content. I’ve got very very basic CSS in place. The basics are here. Now what?
Well, first I need to get my ducks in a row. This includes:
- Stabilizing a proper development and deployment workflow. There’s a rather nice setup over here, and the 2nd edition of Practical Django Projects has also been enlightening in this regard.
- Cleaning up my templates. I created the Blog app first, and so of course now I have like 3 separate apps, and I don’t really want them all to have a different look and feel, so I need to abstract some bits and perhaps create a “/templates/common/” directory that will be referenced by all of the apps in the project…? How do you do it?
- I’d like to get some high-level navigation horizontally across the top instead of having those links in the sidebar. I don’t want fancy popout menus — just a very simple bar where the nav links basically just represent the functions of the different apps: Blog, Articles (CMS), Code, and maybe an About link or something.
- And more!!
After that stuff is out of the way I’ll start thinking about some new features:
- I’d like to be able to include images (maybe multiple images) in various types of content. In fact, perhaps all kinds of content. Screenshots for the code snippets, stock images for CMS and blog content, etc. I’m a little intimidated by this because I know my web host (webfaction) limits the amount of memory I can use at any given time. I guess I can just manually scp images to my static media location and link them into the content, but it doesn’t seem ideal. Ideally I can upload them in the same interface where I edit the content, and maybe have the img src tag associated with the instance of the model I’m editing in the database. Does something do this already?
- I’d really like to have a wordpress-style “Stats” page. Actually, I’d like to have a much better stats page than the wordpress one, but that’d be a start. The stats page I’d actually *like* to have is best described by Marty Allchin here (2 years ago. Anyone know of an app that is aiming for anything close to that?)
- RSS feeds for the code snippets section (this should be simple)
- On-the-fly PDF generation for downloading the PDF version of… whatever. A code snippet, an article… Haven’t even investigated this yet.
- I really, really, really, really want to turn my geek conference calendar into a google maps mashup using GeoDjango. This is another bit I’m slightly intimidated by, because I didn’t realize GeoDjango was built-in these days, and I started out down this road using MySQL as my database for whatever reason (instead of PostgreSQL, which I actually like better and, as it turns out, has way more mature GIS functionality).
- At some point, I’d like to ensure that the old URLs to content that was on the old site will actually still work, and land people on the same content in the new site. The URL layout isn’t actually horrifically different, so hopefully I can get that in place without *too* much fuss. I know Django has a redirection app built-in, but I’m not sure if this is the right way to do it, or if I should just use Apache rewrite rules. Anyone compared the two?
So those are the big goals. Some are simple, others less so, but I hope to complete all of this within the next… well, before the new baby is born, which is going to be some time in the first half of September. Wish me luck (on both), and please share your tips on how I might accomplish any of the above goals (I’ve heard all the tips I can handle about kids, thanks).