WYSIWYG editor in Django Admin

As awesome as the standard Django admin might be, sometimes you want the textfields to have a little bit more functionality. This is quite simple to achieve. We’ll use WYMeditor in this case, but it should be equally easy with TinyMCE, FCKeditor or any other WYSIWYG editor out there.

First download jQuery and put it in [...]

Django foreign key default value example

Here’s an example of how to set a default value for a models.ForeignKey field:
class Foo(models.Model):
    a = models.CharField(max_length=10)
def get_foo():
    return Foo.objects.get(id=1)
class Bar(models.Model):
    b = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    a = models.ForeignKey(Foo, default=get_foo)
Hope this helps someone (I’ve been looking for this quite some time…). If anyone know a better/neater way, please let us know in the comments!!

GeoDjango: getting a random point within a multipolygon

While fooling around with the awesome GeoDjango framework, I was looking for a way to generate a random point within a multipolygon.
Justin Bronn (djangopeople.net/jbronn/), the lead developer of GeoDjango was kind enough to point me in the right direction. I thought I share the concept here as it might be helpful to someone:
Define the function:

def [...]

Update: New Django app: FutureTweets.com

At SolidFlux we’ve been working on a fun new Django project called FutureTweets. It’s a basic Twitter application that allows Twitter users to schedule their updates.
By using FutureTweets, you’ll always have an alibi! You can also schedule reccuring updates daily, weekly, monthly or yearly (handy for sending birthday Tweets ). Please use the comments [...]

Change site layout by user preference

I found a nice Django pluggable app: Django userskins by Will Larson of http://lethain.com.
Similar to Twitter, it provides functionality that allows your users to set preferences about how your site looks to them. Quite handy if you ask me!
Read all about it here.

More on debugging Django

The other day, I read about another interesting way of debugging Django Apps:
If you use the following statement in you code:
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
You can debug you app by running the server with the python command
manage.py runserver -p 8888
Then, after you visit the page where the set_trace() function is called, the server will break the code [...]

restrict access to Django site from all IP’s on Webfaction

For this one project I wanted to deny all access to the site except for a certain IP address. I knew it could be done by using the mod_authz_host Apache Module (more info here), but I couldn’t get it to work on a Webfaction shared hosting account.
After exchanging some mails with the Webfaction support team [...]

Django 1.0 mail notification of new comments

There are some old samples available online for doing this, but the 1.0 version of Django is not compatible with those. So I thought I’d share my solution for sending notification mails whenever there’s been posted a new comment on my Django site using Django signals.
The old way of connecting to a signal was:
dispatcher.connect(myFunction, signal=models.signals.post_save, [...]

Awesome Django Cheat sheet

The guys from Mercurytide released an updated version of their superhandy Django Cheat Sheet. Especially useful when you’re just starting with Django.
http://www.mercurytide.co.uk/whitepapers/django-cheat-sheet/

Debugging Django

I was looking for something similar to print_r in PHP for Django. I haven’t really found something other than:

import pprint
pprint.pprint(dir(modelorobject))

and using:
{% debug %}
in your template, wich display all kinds of debug info.
If anyone has more info on debugging Django, or a print_r kind of way of outputting debug info, please use the comments.
In this context [...]