Sheep Hacking
June 4, 2009 — 9:14AM
At first I thought, "The monotony of sheep herding has finally gotten to these guy's heads." Then I was blown away. 1 million points, guys. You are my new heroes.
The Holy Roman Galactic Empire
June 2, 2009 — 9:36AM
Somehow, I knew this all along.
Props to itsnbits.
Elegant Application Integration with Hooks
February 6, 2009 — 8:49PM
In a previous post, I lamented the corner into which I seemed to have developed myself into as I am creating a CMS framework on Django. The essential problem: If pages are created on-the-fly in the Admin, and these pages are dispatched from a catch-all view, how does one go about tying in form processing or application logic to a specific page, without touching the underlying framework? The idea of my framework was to provide a core CMS around which I could add additional functionality without having to mess around with the framework application proper.
I finally have developed an ...
Django Sites framework and a multi-site CMS
December 9, 2008 — 2:01PM
The Django Sites framework has been widely adopted by many Django apps, as a way to use a single Django installation and a shared database, to serve multiple sites, while keeping the various model objects separated. This greatly simplifies the job of managing multiple Django applications, and makes it possible, for instance, to serve an article up on multiple websites, each running its own separate set of applications, some or all of which may be shared.
The framework is fairly flexible. As the documentation demonstrates, one may use it to associate content with sites in a OneToMany or ManyToMany relationship. ...
OpenLazslo
December 5, 2008 — 9:43PM
I just ran into OpenLazlo. If you have not seen this before, then go there now, and run through the tutorial. While billed as an Internet Platform it is better understood as a very easy way to write a UI that compiles either to Flash or to DHTML/Javascript.
OpenLazlo's native language is called LZX, which is an XML language with embedded Javascript. OpenLazlo can be run in a Client/Server configuration, where the OpenLazlo server can function as a proxy for other media, and a go-between for gathering data and transforming it to XML. It can also compile and serve a ...
Django as CMS or Django as App Framework?
November 26, 2008 — 7:06PM
Like many of you, I once developed my websites by hand, in static HTML. I was proud of my Notepad skills. I learned CSS. I became enlightned and switched to Linux on the laptop, started using vim for everything, and eventually ended up (back) on a Mac, where I happily sit today. As I become responsible for managing more and more sites, doing everthing in static HTML became impractical. I had put off migrating to a CMS for quite some time, mostly because too many CMS's gave you the kitchen sink (Plone, Drupal) but made it a burden to develop ...
Using CodeMirror with Django Admin
November 23, 2008 — 6:29PM
Having gotten a little experience using CodeMirror, I believe I made the right choice. CodeMirror does not use regex for syntax highlighting. It implements an actual code parser. This makes more powerful, but also slower, than regex solutions. The speed, of course, will depend upon your browser's Javascript implementation.
Integration with Django's Admin is not difficult, with a little help from jQuery. For this example, you will need to download the CodeMirror and jQuery source.
Extract the CodeMirror source. The archive will contain a css and a js directory. Place these in the media directory of your app. In this ...
First post - CodeMirror
November 21, 2008 — 3:52PM
First post!
When I began creating my CMS as my first major Django project, my first goal was to eliminate the necessity of editing text files on the filesystem. Therefore it was necessary to store Django Templates and stylesheets in the database. This was easily accomplished. However, it was immediately obvious that editing HTML, CSS, or Javascript inside a conventional browser textbox was a very poor way to create and maintain a site.
I set out to correct this situation, figuring that somebody must have implemented a Javascript-based editor, doing for code what WYSIWYG editors do for content. I quickly found More...
