UPDATE: More pictures on my Flickr page

The first and hopefully not last workshop on Web 2.0 is over. Actually, workshop is the wrong word, since it was more a roadshow of web 2.0 related technologies and concepts (including Django). Anyways, I hope the participants enjoyed it as much as I did.

This workshop was held in our family's holiday home in the Swiss mountains. We had great luck with the weather, which was very mild and rather dry. The temperature inside the house was at some chilly 20 degrees C, turning the entrance hall into a cosy conference room (or cinema room at night).

Apart from drinking far too little beer (that will be taken care of at New Year's Eve, I'm sure), we also listened to a couple of talks and made some progress in the development of the Activity rewrite. The latter will be available in written form soon, the workshop talks will be put online as PDF as soon as I get all the slides.

The conference room

A cosy way to listen to talks!

Coach explains the math...

I'd like to thank all participants with special thanks going to my father and Claude Berner of Vitus GmbH.

Update: A short movie of some impressions is now ready for your viewing pleasures.

Update: Slides in chronological order:

• Web 2.0 - Analyse eines Paradigmenwechsels (PDF | QT)
• Was sind Webapplikationen? (PDF | QT)
• Webbased Projects using PHP (PDF)
• Django - Python Framework für Leute mit Deadlines (PDF | QT)

It's been a long while since I last updated my old page. Reason was that it was cumbersome even to change small things, since it did not feature a web interface, but required me to login via SSH.

All in all, it was a technically cool solution but rather impractical from a user's point of view. Now, since Django, the Python Web Framework, is getting so much attention recently, I gave it a try at redesigning my old page. In fact, I didn't just want to redesign, but extend it with a blog application.

I started diving into Django without having any idea of Python at all (I do however have several years of experience in PHP and Perl/mod_perl and other MVC web frameworks).

How it is done

Django installation and configuration is pretty well-covered on the Django project site and I won't repeat it here again. I'll assume you've successfully installed Django and created your own project.

My page has a number of sections (top navigation bar), which are all based on Django's internal django.contrib.flatpages. The blog section, on the other hand, is a custom application. All it needs is the following model:

 from django.db import models class Tag(models.Model): slug = models.SlugField(prepopulate_from=('title',)) title = models.CharField(maxlength=30) description = models.TextField(help_text='Short summary of this tag') def __str__(self): return self.title def get_absolute_url(self): return "/blog/tag/%s/" % self.slug class Admin: list_display = ('slug', 'title',) search_fields = ('title', 'description',) class Meta: ordering = ('title',) class Post(models.Model): slug = models.SlugField(prepopulate_from=('title',), help_text='Automatically built from the title.' ) assoc_tags = models.ManyToManyField(Tag) title = models.CharField(maxlength=80) date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) body = models.TextField() image = models.ImageField( 'Attach Image', upload_to='blog', blank=True ) def __str__(self): return self.title def get_absolute_url(self): return "/blog/%s/%s/" % (self.date.strftime("%Y/%b/%d").lower(), self.slug) class Admin: list_display = ('slug', 'title', 'date',) search_fields = ('title', 'body',) date_hierarchy = 'date' class Meta: get_latest_by = 'date' ordering = ('-date',) 

To display the tag list on the right of this page, I used a simple template tag like this:

 from django import template from tsonny.blog.models import Tag class TagListNode(template.Node): def __init__(self, varname): self.varname = varname def render(self, context): context[self.varname] = Tag.objects.all() return '' def do_get_tag_list(parser, token): """ {% get_tag_list as tag_list %} """ bits = token.contents.split() if len(bits) != 3: raise template.TemplateSyntaxError, "'%s' tag takes two arguments" % bits[0] if bits[1] != "as": raise template.TemplateSyntaxError, "First argument to '%s' tag must be 'as'" % bits[0] return TagListNode(bits[2]) register = template.Library() register.tag('get_tag_list', do_get_tag_list) 

To include the "latest news" from other website's RSS feeds, I simply took the aggregator code from djangoproject.com (it's in the Trac repository) and modified it a bit.

To make life easier, the interested reader may also want to download the complete code, ready to use (but without templates, of course).