Brian McKinney

After quite a bit of effort and trolling around on Django's google groups, I've finally migrated my website to use Django 1.0. This is outwardly a very small change and if I did the transition properly, no one should have even noticed. The main benefit that I see from this is not having to worry as much about backwards compatibility as Django moves forward.

Most of the upgrade went completely smooth and painless. However, I did run into some major problems with an invalid view that was located in one of my 3rd party apps. I usually feel like the error logs that Django spits out are extremely helpful in debugging, but the URL reversal error messages are extremely confusing. Most of the time I spent going in the complete wrong direction looking for the problem. That said, once I was able to track the problem down, I was able to fix it quickly and move forward.

One thing that I am really psyched about in Django 1.0 is the new comment system. I was using previous version of the built-in Django comment system on this site, in addition to James Bennent's excellent comment utils. The Django community really did a good job and addressed a lot of the issues I had with using the old system. Also, I haven't received a single spam comment since the upgrade (knock on wood), which is freaking awesome.

In addition to migrating to Django 1.0, I did a few other things that I did as well:

Set up a proper dev environment

My dev environment before was called 'production'. This made it very tricky to do any kind of major upgrade or change. Before I even started working with Django 1.0, I created a dev environment to begin testing everything. Having the dev environment was easily worth all of the effort it took to get it going. Now I can be a little more free to experiment with different things and move in some cool directions without fear of breaking stuff.

Moved the server from mod_python to mod_sgi

I've read about a lot of the cool people moving to mod_wsgi over mod_python, so I did a bit of reading on the subject and decided to make the switch. For those of you wondering about whether you should stick with mod_python or change to mod_wsgi, there are really only a couple of major differences. I ran a across a fantastic article explaining some reasons for switching. Mainly the reasoning is:

1. Apparently, mod_python isn't actively being developed anymore
2. mod_wsgi is has some fairly significant speed advantages
3. mod_wsgi is a bit less taxing on system memory

Added a proper media section, so that I can upload photos and images

One of the things that I really wanted to do from the start of this site was to have a proper system for quick uploading of images, audio and video that I wanted to have on this site. I modified Nathan Borror's excellent basic media application to create just that.

Integrated inlines into my blog, so that I can add media into blog posts

Another thing that seems small, but I think is a big deal is being able to utilize the above mentioned media in blog postings. I've been without that ability for a while, and it sucks. Henceforth there will be at least some snazzy pictures with my blog postings.

Fixed various style issues and bugs

I worked pretty hard when I launched this site to make sure the styles were solid and without issue, but I did miss a couple of things. I went back and fixed a handful of styling bugs that had become apparent to me after creating the current version of the site.