Hi Joe, On Apr 16, 11:28 am, "Joe Bloggs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A nice clean site, I would be interested to know:-
Thanks > How long it took to develop? Approximately 5 man months (including all activities). Of these 5 months, only 1 1/2 month have been spent building the actual website as you see it. The rest of the time has mainly been spent on reverse engineering a complete mess of an old site. There is a fairly complex member database behind (the organization has 10.000 members that can have various sorts of affiliations with lots of groups etc.). Before this member database was in a MS SQL Server, and had no administration interface, so the secretaries was manually updating relations in the database, taking the primary key of one row, and manually inserting it as a foreign key in another row! Also, the integration of the old member database on the web, once done through a various TYPO3 extensions that, if documented, were documented and written entirely in french (a language I hardly speak :). On top of that, the old database was in many respects seriously over-model, trying to make it smarter than good was. Additionally, a lot of the data in the database was in a poorly shape, so there was lots of cleaning to do. > Which django components did you use? First of all we use newforms-admin branch, since its a lot more flexible than the old admin. I've found the branch very stable, and the developers are good at describing backward incompatible changes. Besides we use the auth system (works fairly well for 10k members), and a lot of all the core modules. I found that we only seldom used generic views, as a get_object_or_404 witha render_reponse was much more flexible and nearly as easy. The new paginator works as a charm. On top of that, we use django-mptt to manage hierarchical data. This is a really neat application, if you need to eg manage a menu structure. We also use django-cron. The rest is developed by ourselves, this include: menu system + breadcrumb (inspired by the pycon-tech system) static pages (basically a bit like flatpages but with tinymce editor and options for timed publishing and more) press release and image archive adapted from one our other website (www.spacetelescope.org - soon to be running django) simple mass mailing reporting Most of it, we will probably be releasing as open source for others to use, within the next half year. We need to make another site first, with some of the same components. For site wide search we use google search, as it was easier and faster, and as we are an non-profit organization, we don't have to show commercials. > Any gotchas ( things that were unexpected or non-obvious ) you had on the > way? Django can get you a lot of the way very quickly, and is a lot more fun to work with that eg other frameworks for eg Java and PHP. That said, Django cannot do all, and doesn't pretend to either. Especially once you start modeling more complex relationships you start to see what Django doesn't do for you. A simple example is many-to-many relationships with attributes: Say you want to relate any number of contacts with any number of groups, with the catch, that a the contact can have a status within the group (e.g. the contact can be a chair of the group or just a normal member). The ManyToManyField and the admin can't handle this, so you have to do your own many to many relation, and own editor. Managing hierarchical data in a relational database has always been a pain. Django-mptt alleviate you from a lot of the pain, however, it still need a good administration interface (but seems like they are working on that). Cheers, Lars > > Regards, > > Joe > > On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 11:03 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hi, > > > We just released a new website for the International Astronomical > > Union today (an organization of 10.000 professional astronomers, most > > famous for demoting Pluto as a planet - now it's only a "dwarf > > planet"). You can access website athttp://www.iau.org > > > Besides having a nice front-end for visitors, Django allowed us to > > quickly build an intuitive and appealing interface for the managing > > vast amount of membership data and relations for IAU. > > > Thanks for viewing, > > Lars Holm Nielsen > > ESA/Hubble --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
