Growl type notifications in Django

First, a little background

Django has an excellent messages framework which provides support for cookie and session-based messaging, for both anonymous and authenticated users.

The messages framework allows you to temporarily store messages in one request, and retrieve them for display in a subsequent request (usually the next one). Every message is tagged with a specific level determining its priority (e.g. success, info, error).

For example, in a view you can send a message:

Tweaking Django exceptions with custom middleware

When settings.DEBUG is set to False, exception tracebacks will be sent to settings.ADMINS. To make it simpler to track down how and why the exception was raised, it's beneficial to know which user caused the exception.

It's quite simple to do this using some custom middleware. In the Hub, we include the associated users email address in the exception with the following:

Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing

We are about to release the TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) mechanism, which boasts to be the simplest way, ever, to backup a TurnKey appliance across all deployments (VM, bare-metal, Amazon EC2, etc.), as well as provide the ability to restore a backup anywhere, essentially appliance migration or upgrade.

Note: We'll be posting more details really soon - In this post I just want to share an interesting issue we solved recently.

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Django settings.py for development and production

So you developed a Django web application and now need to deploy it into production, but still need to actively continue development (bugfixes, tweaks, adding and testing new features, etc.)

In your development environment you probably had debugging enabled, performance settings disabled, used SQLite as your database, and other settings that make development easier and faster. 

But in production you need to disable debugging, enable performance, and use a real database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, etc.

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Django navigation bar (active link highlighting)

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

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

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

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

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.