Django navigation bar (active link highlighting)

Alon Swartz - Thu, 2010/07/08 - 08:49 - 6 comments
Every web application needs a navigation bar. Common practice is to indicate to the user where he or she is, and is usually implemented by using a visual aid such as a bold type-face, different color or an icon.
 
I wanted an elegant, generic, extendable solution to "highlight" a link on the navigation bar without hardcoding URLs, using ifequals, or using template block inheritance by specifying a navbar block on each and every template (you'd be surprised, but the above mentioned are recommend often).
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Optimizing Django: tricks for faster page loads

Alon Swartz - Wed, 2010/04/28 - 08:15 - 7 comments

By reducing the file size of your CSS, JavaScript and images, as well as the number of unnecessary browser requests made to your site, load time of your applications pages can be drastically reduced, not to mention the load on your server.

Yahoo have created a list of the 35 best practices to speed up your website, a recommended read for any web developer. I wanted to summarize a few I recently implemented in a Django application.

In a nutshell:

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Django User Profiles - Simple yet powerful

Alon Swartz - Wed, 2010/03/10 - 14:41 - 3 comments

So you're building a web application, and using the excellent contrib.auth subsystem to manage user accounts. Most probably you need to store additional information about your users, but how? Django profiles to the rescue!

Django provides a lightweight way of defining a profile object linked to a given user. The profile object can differ from project to project, and it can even handle different profiles for different sites served from the same database.

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Background task processing and deferred execution in Django

Alon Swartz - Wed, 2010/02/24 - 06:15 - 14 comments

Or, Celery + RabbitMQ = Django awesomeness!

As you know, Django is synchronous, or blocking. This means each request will not be returned until all processing (e.g., of a view) is complete. It's the expected behavior and usually required in web applications, but there are times when you need tasks to run in the background (immediately, deferred, or periodically) without blocking.

Some common use cases:

  • Give the impression of a really snappy web application by finishing a request as soon as possible, even though a task is running in the background, then update the page incrementally using AJAX.
  • Executing tasks asynchronously and using retries to make sure they are completed successfully.
  • Scheduling periodic tasks.
  • Parallel execution (to some degree).
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Django Signals: Be lazy, let stuff happen magically

Alon Swartz - Wed, 2010/02/17 - 10:10 - 4 comments

When I first learned about Django signals, it gave me the same warm fuzzy feeling I got when I started using RSS. Define what I'm interested in, sit back, relax, and let the information come to me.

You can do the same in Django, but instead of getting news type notifications, you define what stuff should happen when other stuff happens, and best of all, the so-called stuff is global throughout your project, not just within applications (supporting decoupled apps).

For example:

  • Before a blog comment is published, check it for spam.
  • After a user logs in successfully, update his twitter status.

What you can do with signals are plentiful, and up to your imagination, so lets get into it.

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