Speaking and writing
First off, if you’re going to PyCon (Chicago, March 14-16), make some room on your schedule; there are several interesting talks on Django scheduled, including one by yours truly.
The description of my talk on the PyCon site is somewhat pithy on account of space restrictions, but conveys the general idea of what I’ll be talking about; flexible, reusable Django applications are one of my pet topics, and I’ll be covering some techniques and best practices picked up from a couple years of real-world work with and on Django. It probably won’t be earth-shattering, but hopefully it’ll still be useful.
Also of note: Marty will be taking a peek “under the hood” of Django, showing off some tips and tricks you probably don’t know about and teaching you where to hook in and extend Django’s functionality to suit your own specific applications. And Adrian will be delivering “The State of Django”; hopefully this will be the first in a long line of annual talks on that topic ;)
And now for the other thing.
A little while back I mused on the lack of a “definitive” blog application for Django, and along the way mentioned that the blog application I use on this site is available, but currently undocumented and unsupported. A number of people have expressed disappointment at the lack of official docs for it, and I’ve largely had to keep quiet about that. Right now the blog application is undocumented and unsupported, and in fact it’s not even nicely packaged; the only way to get it is from a Subversion checkout.
There’s a very good reason why there aren’t proper docs for that blog application right now, and it’s that I simply haven’t had time. I finished writing and testing the code in late August and re-launched this site in early September, but as I was wrapping up the redesign and rewrite, I was contacted by Apress, the publishers of the Django book, who asked if I’d be interested in writing a followup.
For the last few months I’ve been devoting what spare time I have to writing, and though there’s still a long way to go I’m now at a point where I can talk about it a bit. The book is titled Practical Django Projects, is listed on Amazon now and is on track to be available in June. Where Jacob and Adrian covered Django from a reference perspective, I’ll be covering it from a hands-on development perspective: Practical Django will teach you to work with Django by working with Django, covering several real, reusable applications from start to finish.
So for those of you who lament the lack of docs for the blog app, I now have a slightly better reply: I haven’t provided documentation yet because my goal is for you never to need to use the application; come June, you’ll be able to go down to your local bookstore and learn all you need to know to write it.