Django 3.2 reaches its end of life in April 2024.  We've been busy upgrading all of our sites to Django 4.2, the current LTS.  As part of this upgrade cycle, we've begun leaning on artificial intelligence tools to see if we could decrease the time it takes for the upgrade.  Happy to report we've seen a significant time savings.

Looking online for answers to the question “how do I dynamically refresh content in the Django admin?” turns up roll-your-own JavaScript solutions, possibly with the help of jQuery. Those solutions were great back in grandad’s day, but nowadays all the cool kids are using HTMX!

Siteconfig is an open source Django package from Imaginary Landscape for quickly and easily toggling Django apps on and off across multiple websites, multiple sections within a single website, or both.

Multi-page, or multi-step, forms are a common way to manage complex user inputs.  This technical post outlines the techniques we use to build them in Django.

One of the biggest issues with Python (our preferred development language) is dependency management.  Any individual deployment can result in minor differences in the versions of the files and libraries which make up the application.  And these minor variations introduce uncertainty and randomness into our deployment process. So, we've investigated…

Companion code for this post: https://github.com/ImaginaryLandscape/deprecate_cmsplugin_filer If you've been building projects using django CMS for any length of time, chances are you're familiar with Divio's cmsplugin-filer application which provided image, link, file, folder and video plugins for interacting with django-filer. And if you're here, chances are you're aware that cmsplugin-filer has now...

Through the use of the Poetry project, incremental changes, and a little luck, the Django 1.11 -> 2.2 and django CMS 3.4 -> 3.7 upgrade was a success, but not without some excessively harsh profanity.

The ability to bypass multifactor authentication can be useful in certain use cases.

Over the years I've become increasingly wary of the word "easy" in software documentation. Pick a software project at random, and there's a good chance the documentation will lead off with something like "Booloogent makes the process of frobnifying your wakalixes easy!" And then you try to use the package...

The Django shell provides an environment where developers can interact with the database via Django's ORM. While the shell is great for basic interactions, it quickly becomes laborious to work in, be it due to manual imports, having to scroll through shell history to repeat commands, or working with / viewing queries returning more than, say, 20 records. These issues, and more, can be remedied by interacting with the ORM in Jupyter notebooks, using Pandas.

Modern websites are complicated pieces of machinery. The requests they initiate can be intensive and take more time to complete than a typical HTTP request-response cycle. This is typically refererd to as a blocking request, in that the browser (and user) waits until the response is received. If the request...

In February 2017, Google announced its plans to discontinue its Google Site Search product. Those clients of Imaginary Landscape who had relied on Google to provide their users with a search engine service for their website looked to us for a new solution. Finding no obvious equivalent replacement, we decided to create our own website scraper and accompanying search app.

Django Web Development, Django Web Framework, Integration and Deployment with Drone, Docker, Django, Gunicorn and Nginx

It boils down to this. An upgrade costs money, sometimes a lot of money, but the result has no visible outcome. In fact, in many cases the only outcome is an assurance that you've reduced the probability of attack, intrusion, breach and related unpleasantness. By any measure, that's a tough...

Django Verison Viewer, Django Plugin, Open source Django Plugin

The recent buzz surrounding Functional Programming (FP for short) is well deserved. Languages like Haskell and Clojure in use by big name companies such as Barclays Captial, Atlassian, and Walmart have helped FP ideas gain a major foothold in industry. I am a Clojurist hobbyist who has been interested in FP for...

Django is being used by corporations worldwide.  Every day, Imaginary does its part to increase this footprint by deploying Django websites and applications to our clients. As a result, Django is being exposed to greater numbers of end users. I'm not talking end user developers.  I'm talking Samantha in marketing...

Braintree Integration in Django Introduction Much has been written about how to implement online payment using the services available from Braintree, but not much has been written about how to do it within a Django framework. Combining the two does not require any special contortions, but as Braintree’s own online...

Class-based views are my favorite feature of Django, so there is an obvious bias when discussing function views and class-based views.  I’ll throw my two cents in here and move on.  I prefer the structure and predictability that class-based views provide. I recognize that there are many instances when a...

The IPython Notebook is a really cool application, and I've always wanted to use it during Django development and debugging.  The only problem is that it requires a lot of dependencies and I feel no need to encumber my production projects with those dependencies for a feature that I only...

The Django Debug Toolbar is a powerful and useful tool for identifying potential trouble spots in your Django application.  Hopefully, this post will serve as a starting point for understanding the information presented by the toolbar.  Also, we will cover a couple of plugins for the toolbar, cache panel, and...

The de facto solution for job queues with background workers is Celery and RabbitMQ, but it is not the right fit for every project. RQ is an alternative to Celery, and while not as featureful, does provide a lightweight solution that makes it easy to set up and use. RQ...