My Django tutorial at PyCon

This was originally posted on blogger here.

Working on my tutorial slides for my PyCon class/tutorial/workshop last night I suddenly came to a stark realization.

Out of dozens of slides, only 5 of them are Pinax specific.

o.O

I think this is because the slides are a condensed version of what the best and brightest in the Django and Python community think are good practices and tools. What do I mean?

• Jacob Kaplan-Moss on matching best practices with incredible documentation and tests.
• James Bennett on using small apps rather than monolithic ones.
• James Tauber and Brian Rosner's code in Pinax which taught me and so many others incredible Django tricks.
• PEP-8
• Zen of Python
• Mark Ramm on well, nearly everything but especially his critical commentaries on Django.

So what does this mean?

Well, I've been rethinking the mantra "Pinax is Django".  It is hard to say that when users of django-cms and satchmoproject and other frameworks can't use core Pinax components. That said, users of those tools tend to rely on same foundation: Python, Django, virtualenv, and pip and growing ecosphere of Django Packages.

Which leads me to realize that with just 5 slides pertaining to Pinax material in the tutorial, the Pinax Solutions class could be renamed "Django Solutions class with a bit of Pinax".

And this makes a lot of sense. Some of the bits that made Pinax special such as static media handling are now part of Django as of the forthcoming 1.3 release. Lessons learned from Django Uni-Form which grew out of supporting div-based forms in Pinax are helping determine the path of forms work in Django 1.4. Which means that if you are using django-cms or other CMS, django-shop or other e-commerce tools, then you are benefitting from what Pinax has done for the community.

All of this leads to my closing statements about the class/workshop: The class is about Django with a little bit of Pinax tossed in. Having in the past worked with multiple non-Pinax projects, I can assure you that the solutions presented and the workshop itself will be of use to you regardless of if your project is using that framework.