So far, I have been impressed by the beta for Django 1.2.  With the official version due later this month I was ready to try out some of it for a site I’m working on.  By the time I’m finished, 1.2 will be officially out so I can just update it then and make any changes necessary from the beta to full version.

I wrote a quick post on Django Rocks earlier mention 3 key features I have been testing. Here it is.  There is also a mention do the Django debug toolbar, which I highly recommend everyone use during development.

As a side note, I’d also like to announce I will soon be setting up another blog for myself (now available at piggeh.net). Not technical at all, just the other parts of my life which really don’t join at all with the development side.  It’s all Anime, Games, Movies maybe stuff on music.  They relate to some of the other sites I have built, currently own, or am building.

Recently I started writing facebook connect, from scratch, into one of the sites I’m working on.  Its actually a very easy process.  The (new?) javascript library is very good, setting cookies for authentication etc.

After actually having authenticated myself within my own site (facebook side) there is still quite a lot to do.

• Creating / Updating accounts  – Uses the REST api.  I’ve got the account details, just need to use them
• Authenticating the user automatically using the standard Django auth.
• Removing accounts (or something if people remove my app from their list
• A cron to update the accounts every 24 hours, facebook caching requirements

A few side things to still be done (maybe) wall posts, friend invites and I’m slightly tempted to use the facebook comments system, however…I am not entirely sure of the benefit of doing that rather than creating my own (which I have elsewhere) or using the standard Django comments framework.

This facebook connect stuff will also be part of the tutorials in future as well.

Well, at the moment I am working on a site, built with Django.  I’ve decided to, sort of, release the source code for it.  What I will be doing is writing tutorials based on many aspects of the site, which also means…real world examples rather than just snippets and hello world.

All of the Django based tutorials will be published in full on DjangoRocks.com and a few will probably make it here as well.  It may help a few people, who knows.  Some of the key parts of it include;

• Breadcrumbs
• User profiles
• Writing a forum
• Generic foreign keys
• Custom template tags
• Image upload & manipulation
• Internationalization (possibly)
• Scheduled tasks
• HTML & Text E-mail with templates
• Caching & Performance

Thats just the Django parts, also expect a couple of javascript (mainly MooTools) tutorials as well. The Javascript tutorials will, initially, only be posted on this site. There isn’t really much point in posting MooTools tutorials, on a Django site.

• Simple lightbox
• Slideshow
• Some AJAX tabs

I know scripts for those are all available, but scripts you use don’t really make you better developers.  People don’t usually spend time finding out what the scripts do, but hopefully they will be a guide into the mootools world.