Django Endeavours

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 23rd February, 2006 @ 03:30

If you're visiting my RSS feed you probably won't notice that anything has changed. Except the Intel Macs posting has been moved up to the top of the pile (well, below this one when it's posted). Sorry about that, it was missing a <p> tag! If you're viewing the RSS feed, just this once take a look at the website the old fashioned way.

I've decided to start from scratch and rebuild the site in Django. In part I'm doing this to get more flexibility than Plone offers me. But mostly because it's a good way to start learning Django. And because I've coded the page from scratch, it's also helped me get a better grip on CSS layouts. There's no tables here! I should probably remove the XHTML compliant logo at the bottom though, as apparently it isn't since the real blog content got loaded in!

Things are working in a rather unnecessarily complicated way right now, just how I like it! Mod_rewrite is mapping requests for ^/$ to the running Django server (which should only really be used for development apparently) and the rest is rewritten to the Plone instance as usual. So if you click any of the internal links you'll be back in the old site.

My plan is to migrate a bit at a time. I'm even using Subversion to manage the Django part of the site, which has proved very useful. As time goes on more of the site will exist inside this layout. No doubt I'll excitedly be keeping you posted when such events happen. It might not be for a few weeks though, I'm currently waiting for the unstable development branch of Django I'm using to be merged back into the trunk (it brings big API changes, which is why I'm not using the trunk version right now).

This of course means that, at least for now, I've decided to go with Django over TurboGears. A rather out of the blue decision in some ways. It was triggered by me learning more about Django and then seeing some really hideous TurboGears code that put me off it somewhat. That, and the Django automatically built admin system is great!

By the way, I've not actually migrated the blog yet, I've just written a quick bit of code that loads in the RSS feed from the Plone site and renders it in the new layout! How many other web technologies can I use to serve a single page I wonder?!

Let me know what you think of the new design, criticisms and suggestions will be just as warmly received as any positive comments regarding my rather underdeveloped design skills. I've been starring at it for so long to get to this point that I've lost any sense of how good or bad it looks.