Week 10 Miscellany

Admin inlines for many-to-many fields

As of this week, in the development version of Django it's possible to use admin inlines for many-to-many fields.

If that would be useful for your project, you can switch from Django==1.1.1 in your requirements.txt to -e svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk#egg=Django. This tells pip to get Django straight from the Subversion repository at code.djangoproject.com. If you do this, you'll probably want to install, then freeze your requirements.txt at the installed version (use pip freeze) so you don't get surprised by unexpected new changes when you deploy a new virtualenv.

Nice email regex - now don't use it!

Validating email addresses correctly is really hard - even if you think you've got a very generous regex, chances are good that you're prohibiting some valid email addresses (for instance, if you used \w+ to match the part before the @, you're ruling out quite a few characters that are actually valid in email addresses (+, ., and some others).

Locking out users with valid email addresses is not a recipe for happy users! So stick to Django's built-in forms.EmailField for validating email addresses and you'll be in better shape.

Feedback on this class

Remember that feedback app I've been demoing stuff on? I did actually intend to use it, and this week I finally got it into usable shape (well, if you don't consider the complete lack of design). It's at http://feedback.dj.goshen.edu.

Please take a couple minutes this week to fill that out and let me know your thoughts on how this class is going, what's been helpful, what could be done better, etc. Thanks!

Basic form review

ModelForms (feedback app)

Useful bits you may need for your project

Allowing users to input formatted text

django-markitup (use ==dev rather than the 0.3.0 release, to get the good stuff from django-markupfield included too. See the documentation).

Image uploads, showing image thumbnails

sorl-thumbnail

User registration

Possibilities:

• The old standby: register with an email/password, send confirmation/activation email. Use django-registration for this.
• Use OpenID (allows people to log in with their Google account, a Yahoo account, or any other OpenID provider). Several options here, but I haven't yet used any of them. django-socialauth, django-openid, django-authopenid...
• If you only want GC students logging in, you can authenticate directly against GC's CAS (Central Authentication Service) server (thanks Paul O!). To do this, use the django-cas reusable app, with a CAS login server of https://login.goshen.edu/cas/.

Comments

Use Django's built-in contrib.comments app.