Playground Blues

Xian http://mintchaos.com

Nice. I’ll have actual feedback once I play with them a bit next week.

James Bennett http://www.b-list.org/

Feature request: make it work with Python 2.3.

Austin W

I’ve been following these apps quietly for a little bit. Mostly just Boilerplate which I’ve learned a lot from. I look forward to working with all of them when I get a chance.

On a completely odd side note: Your website is number 3 when you google “New Hampshire Loft”…

Jeff Croft http://jeffcroft.com/

Wow, these are astonishingly similar to some apps I’ve been putting together at Blue Flavor. Nicely done, sir. I’ll definitely take some bits and pieces. :)

One design suggestion: In my “people” app, which was designed for the exact same reason as yours, I did include an optional ForeignKey field to User. Even though the folks in the People app will generally not be users of your system, it is possible they could be, and if they are, I’d like to have that association. For example, if I used your apps for myse personal site, and had Pro CSS Techniques in my library (for which I am an author), I would be in both People and Users. I think those two pieces of data should be tied together. Just a suggestion. :)

James McEwan http://onezom.com

Very cool, I’ve been planning to rebuild my site in django for the last week, these will no doubt help with the process.

Adam Spooner http://adamjspooner.com/

These look great to me!

I know you are keeping them basic … but when you first went back to using Playground Blues I was inspired by your library app and wrote one myself. It does pretty much the same thing, but it gets information from Amazon based on the book title using an ajax call. It allows you to choose which book you meant (via a select), publishes author(s), user ratings, summary, etc. … it even creates a referrer link.

I’d love to add it to the app … though it might be a little bloated. =)

James McEwan http://onezom.com

Just had a chance to play with some of these. It might be cool to roll the full hcard spec into the Profiles app.

Pradeep Gowda http://www.btbytes.com

Good idea! and code to show for it too. I say fantastic :)

Some more ideas:

• Basic Photos
• Basic Photo Gallery
• Basic Polls ( what about this http://code.google.com/p/django-polls/ ?)
• Basic Purchase Order / Vendor

I’ll try to study your code and see whether there is anything I can do to add to the list.

Jamie Pittock http://lifeofsmallbeer.co.uk/

These are great! I love this kind of stuff as a way of learning.

No' http://jehaisleprintemps.net

quick thing you definitely need to do NOW, before it’s too late: label your fields, change your strings, etc. using the i18n function, so anyone can translate your apps in any language and have these applications talking their language. The i18n mechanism is darn simple, and helps so much the non-english-speaking community.

Empty http://blog.michaeltrier.com

Awesome stuff!! Thanks so much for putting this together. I’ve got a lot of these pieces in a largish app I’m building but some of it I don’t. I always enjoy peeking through someone else’s code.

Yong

Cool stuff. How about a basic patients record app? Have something basic that can scale to do real medical/dental and so on. That would be a killer category app.

Steve Erickson

These are awesome. Thanks for the work. How about an Events/Calendaring basic app too?

Paul

How about a “basic forum” app? Too big to be basic?

Thanks,

paul

Thomas Gautier

Thank you very much for your work. Those apps are great.

I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t be better to have them unicode ready for all of us who are not speaking english as a first language :)

Å ime

This is great.

I wonder what would be the most efficient workflow for modifying your basic apps and still keep up with the original changes and enhancements. Letâs say you checkout Basic Blog and decide to make some changes to templates and maybe tweak models a bit. What would be ideal to do? Create a branch, merge manually etc.?

Frits

First: thank you for releasing this.

I’m a complete Django beginner but would like to use your “Basic Blog” to practice. The problem is I can’t get it installed. Can you give a small explanation how to get this working?

(This is how I do it and fail: create new project, add your code as application, edit settings , but when I try to do a syncdb I fail miserbly..)

Dave Lowe http://davejlowe.com

These are great, Nathan! You rock!

BTW, I hadn’t seen urlpatterns structured like you have them before, and I love it. And since I haven’t had the time to get into tests yet, it’s very nice to see some real-world examples.

Michael

dependencies

Sime

Nathan,

I was thinking more in the line of the end user. Suppose I want to use your Basic App. I do a checkout. Next I want to edit all of the templates and maybe some other minor things. So, I drifted from your app and modified it, so I no longer can do a simple svn up to keep things fresh.

From this point of view, this isn’t completely pluggable. My view of a pluggable app is the one you checkout, optionally do some configuration and don’t touch it anymore, it just works and it is upgradable to the future versions without intervention (given that the API/models/etc are stable and backwards-compatible).

Which prompts me to find a workflow that would allow both. To easily get the latest versions of the Basic Apps while retaining the custom modifications I made. Because this apps are meant to be customized.

So any best practices for this? I was thinking to convert the repos to Git (no need for this but I just prefer both the Git and the decentralized model and the branching is easier) and then keep up with the upstream and later manually merge latest upstream code into any customized altered apps.

I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something obvious here but I don’t think there is some particular easy way to do this, basically everyone will just use what’s best for them.

Sime

@Nathan: Yes, I am aware of that. I was just wondering what methods are people in general using.

Anyway, thanks for this, love all your work. I’m a fan of both you and Wilson Miner. You guys have some serious style, I am inspired by your layouts, CSS methodologies and Django related work.

Bruce

I really, really like this idea!

But I wonder if a few of the apps might be more generic. For example, People could be a more generic Agent, to encompass organizations as well?

Likewise, Book could be a more generic Document to encompass articles, etc. (and to go back to organizations, a Publisher would just be a related Organization).

I presume all of this would be more seamless when Django supports inheritance, but it might be good to get more generic now and then later add in subclasses?

For reference, I do work with scholarly bibliographic data.

Ken-ichi

Howdy Nathan. I’m a Django noob, and these apps have been insanely helpful to me, both for learning purposes and for actual use. Thanks!

One question I have is how best to install them. I’d like to install them in an ‘apps/’ directory at the root of my site instead of installing them somewhere in the PYTHONPATH, so different sites can use different checkouts of the Basics apps if they need to. However, this causes some scoping problems with lines like “from blog.managers import *” in blog/models.py.

Is there a good way around this that I’m missing? Again, still learning about Django, so I’m betting it’s something obvious…