Django-powered Snow
During the planning of our Christmas card at work this year, a mad idea came up. Do we ignore mad ideas? No, we tackle them head-on.
Category: Django
South 0.6.2
In my neverending quest to save the time of those using RDBMSen, South 0.6.2 is released.
South 0.6.1
South 0.6.1 is now available for public consumption; it fixes quite a few bugs.
South 0.6
It is with great pleasure (and a measurable sense of relief) that I announce the release of South 0.6, a new release bringing quite a few new features, although most of them aren't immediately obvious.
South 0.6 Release Candidate
After a long few months, during which I've increased my recommendations to run off trunk, South 0.6 is almost here.
South 0.6 news
It's about time I posted an update on what's going on with South development, so here it is.
South’s Design
I had a lot of interesting chats with people about South last week at EuroDjangoCon, and several eyebrows have been raised at me both parsing models and then storing their definitions as dicts.
EuroDjangoCon Slides
For those interested, the slides from my migrations talk at EuroDjangoCon are up. I believe the videos will be around soon.
South 0.5
I'm pleased to announce the release of South 0.5; this has been a long and exciting release, with many new features...
Mornington Square
Have you ever felt the burning need to ride aimlessly aimfully around the London Underground? Well, then I have good news for you.
Southerly Breezes
Work on South has been going full steam ahead lately, with some good results.
Fun with GIS
I've always been somewhat envious when seeing the various sites with nice maps of crime, prices and other things for non-UK regions.
South 0.4 Released
After far too many months of quiet feature development and bug fixing, we're happy to finally announce South 0.4, which has a whole host of new features to satiate your every migration need.
The list of new features alone really is quite long; you can see it at http://south.aeracode.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes/0.4, but I'll go through a few of them quickly:
South So Far
It's been a while since I last talked about South, so it's about time I did a short update, I think. There's been a fair few things going on since last time, which was, err, a long time ago.
Firstly, we now have SQLite support (apart from column renames/alters/deletes; I'll be implementing those with the appropriate workarounds soon). This was one of the features I most wanted to roll in, since SQLite is quite widely used for quick development. SQL Server support is also on the way soon!
Also in the news, TWiD's latest episode has some interesting poll results for schema migrations; of the respondents, over half are using one of the premade tools, and of those about 2/5 are using South - good news for the migration camp overall, and a surprisingly high amount for South, considering I have a limited picture of who's using it.
Denormalisation Follies
One of the topics that popped up repeatedly at DjangoCon last weekend was how bad purely normalised table structures are, and how denormalisation is good for many things, including making your database cry less.
To that end, during the gaps in PyConUK this weekend, I decided to see how easy it would be to write a new Django field that will automatically denormalise a field in a related table across to another model.
And That was DjangoCon
There are not very many things that could tempt me to fly 10 hours twice for only a weekend, but DjangoCon was one of them, and I'm glad I went; it was one of the best weekends I've had for quite a while.
There were plenty of good talks; I can't mention them all here, since as we all know, bytes cost money, but in that vein I must at least mention Cal Henderson's talk 'Why I Hate Django' - a brilliantly done talk on the things Django's missing, as well as the fact we don't have a mascot (or do we?) and that we aren't smug enough.
South 0.3
The world of migrations in Django is definitely warming up now, and with that we're proud to announce the release of South 0.3, the 'intelligent django migrations app', available now from south.aeracode.org.
New in this release are the use of fields rather than dicts for specifying columns in migrations, so migrations now look cleaner, work with all the databases Django supports to a better extent, and even support custom fields.
Also new is dependencies between apps, for those situations where your forum app's Post depends on your accounts app's Profile; South will work out the right way to apply everything so foreign keys don't horribly break.
South Changes
With the launch of its own site - south.aeracode.org - and Andy McCurdy jumping in to help out, South has been making some good progress. We've made a few backwards incompatable changes, which while annoying will hopefully make things much easier in future.
South, version 0.2
After the initial release some time last week, and a generally positive reaction, South now has a 0.2 release.
The most important (and only major) change is the addition of MySQL support, so the other section of Django users can finally give it a try. There's also the ability to create all models' migrations at once.
Dual Django Version Fun
With the recent massive changes to Django trunk - newforms-admin being the biggest - I've found a need to run both oldforms-admin and newforms-admin versions in both development and production; here's a quick HOWTO on both.
Introducing South
Tired of having to drop tables to re-syncdb your django models? Django-evolution not working, or too magic? Then I have just the solution; my newest project, South; intelligent migrations for Django projects.
Goodbye Wordpress, hello Django
While I have been a happy user of Wordpress for many years, it was about time I jumped ship and moved my blog to something that let me manage things like project lists more sanely, and so welcome to my new Django-powered blog.
LastGraph at Oxford Geek Night Seven
Well, last night I gave a talk at one of the ever-brilliant Oxford Geek Nights, and in case you're baying for the slides I used (all seven of them), you can find them at this wonderful OGN7 LastGraph Slides link. If you live within punting distance of Oxford, you should really try to come to the next one on August 27th. If not; well, they put videos up on the site...
LastGraph3 Beta!
After much work, lastgraph3's beta is now out. Please be warned that it may not work, may explode, and may abduct your cat, dog or goldfish in the process of failing.
LastGraph has been given a kick….
LastGraph has been given a much needed refresh, including a tweak to the render nodes to stop them running out of file handles/memory/disk space, and the main site so it in fact remembers when it deletes XML caches to free up space rather than wandering around going "I'm sure I put that file somewhere...".
Django and Cairo: Rendering Pretty Titles
One of the overwhelming horrors of designing for the web (or so it would appear from a lot of the mockups I've seen) is that designers (and people who are just bored of Arial and Times New roman) want to make their titles on web pages using non-standard fonts. "But that's shockingly non-accessible and uses more bandwidth", I hear you cry; well, there's a reason the alt tag is around, and why broadband is much more common.