Sun, 08 Mar 2009
Three New Debian Django Packages
Recently my employer, credativ UK1 have been kind enough to allow me to spend some time working on Debian packaging from some Django apps we've started using internally. Chris Lamb was kind enough to sponsor the upload of these packages.
Django developers, this means that if you are running a Debian GNU/Linux machine2, you can type:
apt-get install python-django-<app name>and you will have it installed for all users on the system. You won't need to mess around with any Python packaging systems, or modify your environment to be able to use them.
So, what are the packages and why are we using them?
django-tinymce
django-tinymce is a Django app providing integration with TinyMCE, a pure JavaScript rich text editor. It provides a widget that can be used within forms, and can also easily be used within views. It integrates with django-filebrowser, which I will mention below.
django-cms integrates with django-tinymce to provide a rich text editor for pages within it. As our website content will have to be maintained by people who may have little or no experience with HTML (or Markdown or anything else that isn't Word), this is obviously desirable.
django-filebrowser
django-filebrowser is a Django app that provides a file management interface within the Django admin interface. It should essentially replace an FTP client, allowing browsing and upload/deletion/editing/renaming of files on the server.
As mentioned above, django-tinymce integrates with django-filebrowser, to allow users to upload content they will be using with the edited text. This saves us from having to teach our potentially technically-illiterate users how to either access the web server remotely or how to use the version control system we're using for the website (bzr, incidentally).
django-contact-form
django-contact-form which provides generic, extensible contact-form functionality for Django. It streamlines the process of displaying a contact form and emailing the contents of it out once the 'Submit' button is clicked.
Our website include a contact form, and django-contact-form saves me from having to worry about a number of issues involved in the implementation, as well as reducing the amount of internally maintained code I'm writing.
1 That website will soon be replaced by a very similar one using Django as the backend. Hopefully I will blog about this once the rollout is complete.
2 Currently just the unstable distribution, but soon to be testing/squeeze. Backports will also be trivially easy.
Posted: Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:52 | | Comments: 1