20 Jan 09 Weekend Coding Wrapup
I sat down and pounded out quite a bit of code last weekend, which is kind of unusual. I want to summarize what happened and leave some notes for myself.
On the comments front, I worked commenting into both the news and polls applications. This was astonishingly easy as I had already done the work once for the photo of the day. Django’s content types framework is really nice. Having the ability to attach comments to arbitrary models is just brilliant.
It occurred to me that I should take advantage of Django forms media, and then I wouldn’t have to repeat the several lines of <link> and <script> tags I have to add to every page that uses the markItUp! editor. I added a “get_comment_form for” template tag, and then I thought I could just do a “{{ form.media }}” at the top of the template and then use the same form variable at the bottom of the template. But this did not work. I believe it has something to do with using the form variable in separate blocks in my templates that extend my base template. I posted a question about this on the django-user’s list, but did not receive a response. Oh well, not a huge deal, but I must investigate why this didn’t work sometime.
The other weird thing that happened was my Firefox browser started lurching to a halt when the shoutbox was being displayed with my new CSS scheme. I swear it didn’t do this before with the older CSS. So I got mad and disabled the Javascript scrolling for now, leaving it with a scroll bar (which actually doesn’t look that bad to me). I think this is only a problem on the Linux Firefox, I have not seen this on Windows. I have noticed that some sites give Linux Firefox some trouble if they have Javascript. It seems to eat an inordinate amount of CPU, making things like paging up and down a chore. I started looking at some jQuery-based tutorials for an alternate means for scrolling but didn’t find anything that jumped out at me right away. Again, I’ll put that on the to-do list.
On the CSS front, I came across the Blueprint CSS framework. This looks interesting for a design dolt like myself. It may help me with the overall site structure.
And finally last night I started working on the downloads application. This is my last “easy” application. After that I have to work on the calendar, the member map, Paypal, and the forums. The downloads application will be very similar to the Web links application that I did early on. It will contain many of the same types of views and sorting options. I am going to try and do it a bit smarter this time as I have learned a lot since then. I want to add an AJAX style star rating system and comments. I may then go back and refactor Web links with what I have learned. Ideally I should be looking for ways to share the code. If Django had a class-based way of handling views I think I could see a way forward. I could also finally break down and investigate generic views.
