It's good that you brought this up, because this is actually a problem I've had, as someone just starting out with web dev, and with coding, with how the CMS is distributed.
Django is the Framework, on top of which Mezzanine, the CMS, runs. Why, then, is Mezzanine distributed with Django subsumed into its installer? This creates a falsely monolithic aspect to Mezzanine. I understand the convenience, but it muddies the view. You quizzed me on irc as to whether I had done the Django tutorial. I told you that I had, and indeed, I did it multiple times, and supplemented that with other well-known tutorials, both Django and Rails, to solidify the MVC concept (it is my policy, whenever possible, to have every thing I learn, be it a practical system or an abstract concept, explained to me by three different people/documents/videos/tutorials/whatever). The source of my glaringly stupid errors is not that I haven't done my homework, however that may look. This is the problem I have with how Mezzanine is distributed - the Django tutorial teaches you to think of things as having a certain type of file structure, with a models.py and a views.py, for instance, in your project's home dir. If you install Mezzanine, these files are not there. They obviously are *somewhere*, but they are most distinctly *not* where the Django tutorial told me to expect to find them. I did not, and I still do not, know exactly how to do deal with that, because it doesn't fit into the schema that I learned in the Django tutorial. My intention, when I learned about Mezzanine and decided to try it out, was to install it and examine the code, *specifically* in the context of having *just* done the Django tutorial. But because the files were not where I expected them to be, and because I was too new and too ignorant of about a thousand other things (at every level - Python, Django, Linux, Abstract Programming Concepts - every level), I was stymied. I'm working alone, with no peers, so whatever resources are on the net are all I've got. My goal is to be able to work straight from Django and develop complex apps of my own (and ultimately, recreate my rather simple Blog from my own models and views - not because it's better to do it that way, but because it's more instructive and useful, on a personal development level, to do it that way). Mezzanine doesn't just run on top of Django, it *hides* Django, and itself for that matter, from the new user, and thus far, I haven't found a document on the web that explains why the views.py and models.py got hidden, and where I can find them and look them over and mess around with them - indeed, *all* of Mezzanine's infrastructure is hidden. If this is a structure that has been built on top of a Django framework, why can't I, having done the Django tutorial, easily examine that infrastructure, to see how it works? Why is the directory structure changed, and where is the Mezzanine tutorial that explains this to newbies who have *only* done the Django tutorial? I realize that I can, that I only need to hunt down those views and models, which I know are in there somewhere, but the creators of Mezzanine have taken steps to make them hard to find for newbies. I'm sure that it makes things a million times easier for professionals, of course, in ways that I do not understand yet, but of which I acknowlege, and plead, my own ignorance. So, when you admonish me to check the Django docs in cases where the problem is a Django problem rather than a Mezzanine problem, I would like *nothing* more than to do just that, I assure you, but I'm at the "drinking from the firehose" phase of my personal development into a developer, and I have a hard enough time sorting out which parts are Django and which parts are Mezzanine, *without* the fact that Mezzanine is not distributed separately from Django in spite of the fact that it *is* separate from Django, and indeed, is setup in such a way as to make the lines between the two *extremely* blurry for a beginner like me. I noticed, as a suggestion, that there's an IDE, Aptana I think? That's distributed both as a monolithic app, and as a plugin to Eclipse - maybe Mezzanine could release an "explicit" version that "plugs into" a raw Django server, so that competent-but-ignorant folks like myself, fresh out of Django tutorial school, could more easily recognize that line between Django and Mezz? I've actually been trying to figure out how to find the actual Mezzanine code for a while now, cause the way I really learn is by messing around with stuff at that level, changing words or colour settings, so I can just see what affects what, and after a while (after breaking and restoring it a billion times) I get so I really know the thing. But reaching that point is touch and go, and unfortunately, the working dev's emphasis on "getting things done" stands in the way of actual learning, much of the time. While I recognize the obvious advantages to these tools like fabric and such (I'm reading the Fabric docs today), there is also the fact that at this point in time, it is of more personal value to me to execute each command in that fabfile by hand, so I can actually understand the parts of the system and how they work together. Once I'm working in the industry, I'll love that stuff, but right now it just makes it harder to learn. Anyways, it's Christmas, so I know you're not prioritizing the revision of your tutorial today, but in the spirit of same, I gratefully acknowledge your patience with me, and your willingness to help out a newbie. All of these criticisms I'm writing are intended in a spirit of constructiveness, even if my frustration with the process occasionally surfaces in my rhetoric. If I can successfully deploy this, in fact, I intend to document the process myself, cause I'm actually rather good at writing tutorials, and for now I see them as how I can start to give back to the community, even though I still can't contribute code of any sort. But before I can teach, I need to fully learn. I appreciate every scrap of personal attention paid to me and my issues, just for the record. I'm here, doing this, because (among other things) Richard Stallman is a personal hero. I want knowledge, and I want to share that knowledge. Getting a decent job out of the deal is also hoped for, natch, but my approach here is meditative. I guess I'm being a bit verbose because there is an aspect to this community where people only seem willing to help those who have demonstrated that they have tried to learn things on their own first, and indeed I have - the fact that my mistakes are glaring and dumb are not a sign of inattention, but of the fact that I am learning many things in a short period of time, including the minutiae of various languages and protocols and systems, along with the macro picture of how fits (or fails to fit) with the others, all using only the "Big Data" of the community's collective output, filtered through the almighty algos of Google. It's touch and go, and when I start a tutorial, I generally seek to mindlessly follow as much as possible, and when I write a tutorial, I try to write it in such a way that it can be mindlessly and successfully followed - that is, cover every *required* step, however minimal and obvious. If it's a keystroke that needs to be pressed in order to finish the tutorial, it should be mentioned in the tutorial (and ideally, explained succinctly, with a link to a deeper explanation for those who want or need to learn more). That's what I'll be attempting to write, as soon as I have ascertained and compiled the successful set of steps that result in a deployed Mezzanine blog. I actually haven't even examined whether Amazon has better documentation for Vagrant (to which you can consider me a convert). As mentioned elsewhere, Digitalocean's Vagrant tutorial is from 2013, and even their internal links are out of date, but the Vagrant tutorial I did successfully deployed a Hubot to AWS, so maybe I can adapt that. Blarg. Whatever the case, for many reasons (including some plans I have for the Raspberry Pi), I'm intending to stick with a Python framework, and Mezz covers all of my needs to a T, so please let me know once you figure out that password problem we were having. No rush, I know it's Christmas. And have a good one, if that's what you're into. I'm more of a solstice hippie type. :> On Wednesday, December 24, 2014 9:37:21 AM UTC-6, Kenneth Bolton wrote: > > ALLOWED_HOSTS is another one you should rely on the Django documentation > for. In fact, that should always be your first path. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Mezzanine Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
