Django djblets it an interesting library of helper django code. It was created by the peeps behind the open source project ReviewBoard and the source for djblets can befound in the project's code base. Today they posted "Django Development with Djblets: Data Grids" which details a more intelligent table generation than your simple HTML table, including sorting, paging, highlighting, linking, data mapping, etc. Here's an example in action: user list.

Now, they have coupled the UI to the YahooUI library and ExtJS and that's the not too awesome part. Although those are both terrific and amazing libraries themselves, I just don't like being tied to an external js library when using a "reusable" app. Then again, if you were going to pick an external solution I suppose that one-two combo is one of the top contenders and they are looking for contributors to help support other libraries so I'll shut up. Anyhow, check it out. Here's the rest of the djblets source code and the post announcing the library with additional tutorials.

Djblet’s feature list currently consists of:

• Authentication improvements, making it easy to register and login in one step, seamlessly, handle password recovery, and more.
• Flexible datagrids for displaying data in a paginated list with user-specific column customization, ordering and sorting.
• Decorators to drastically simplify creation of simple and block template tags.
• Caching functions for calling a function and caching the result if the data isn’t already in the cache, and a special URL pattern matcher that prevents caching of any contained URLs.
• Unit testing utility classes.

Eric Holscher is a new(?) blogger I've been following. He's an employee over at The World Company (think LJWorld, the birthplace of django) and he's joining the few people creating screencasts in the django community. His latest project is django-testmaker and what it does is offer a productivity boost by automating test generation.

Kudos to Eric for not only posting the code for the community to use and hopeful grow, but also tackling the often under appreciated task of creating a well executed screencast.

If you don't know Disqus (pronounced discuss) it's a service for commenting. Sounds boring, but it's not. In fact, they kind of took the concept of comments and turned it upside down. They made their feature rich service easy to implement on any site and then made it even simpler to manage your comments - both the ones you've submitted around the web yourself, and the ones other people left on your site. Oh, and the did this all using python, django and well... a lot of client side javscript I'd have to assume.

Just recently they announced in "Testing Django Applications" that they released a patch 7936 for implementing in browser testing using Selenium.

I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the This Week In Django (TWiD) team as Community Evangelist. What does this mean? Michael and Brian officially announced my addition on this past week's TWiD podcast. What the heck is a Community Evagelist? Well, it could mean a lot of things actually.

I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the This Week In Django (TWiD) team as Community Evangelist. What does this mean? Michael and Brian officially announced my addition on this past week's TWiD podcast. What the heck is a Community Evangelist? Well, it could mean a lot of things actually.

If you haven't heard, with this weekend's django sprint we have the merge of the much anticipate newforms-admin branch. Huge congrats goes out to Brian Rosner and the django contributors who made this happen!

Brian put together an excellent tutorial and screencast to get you started. It's a must read/watch type of thing, so what are you waiting for? Watch it now.

You always write tests for your code right? Well do you right tests first (TDD) or after you've "completed" your work? Both, right? Well if not, the good, disciplined programmer in you should consider trying to write tests both before and after to increase the quality of your work.

That being said, there's a place and time for everything, and some times tests are the first things to get dropped in exchange for time constraints, and context of the project (a personal project for example).

But if you are writing test for your python apps you've probably been using either PyMock or Mock (there are others, please leave a comment if you want to suggest one). Well, just last week GOOG released their open mocking framework titled Mox. Definitely something to check out the google code project page.

One of the reusable apps I see consistently mentioned in the djangosphere is basic-apps. The man behind the multi-app solution (blog, people, movies, books, profiles, music, places remarks, media, and inlines) is Nathan Borror, Interactive Art Director for LJWorld in Lawrence, Kansas — which just so happens to be the home where django was born. He's also responsible for the EveryBlock iconography, as well as a writing an excellent blog playgroundblues.com. We talked basic-apps, tumblog, blogging well, personal blogs, navigation, usability, minimalism, iconography, django and design, iphone, djangocon, django-nyc, python-nyc, django sprints, open sourcing your code, his flash mp3 player, and music. It's about 30 minutes long, enjoy!

When working with asp.net there's a neat little solution for taking your app "offline" or maintenance mode. It's called app_offline.htm and Scott Guthrie wrote a nice tutorial on how to implement it. But we're talking django today and now djangonauts have an open source solution of their own called django-maintenancemode. Essentially, think of it as a forced "splash" page where you can provide whatever message you want to your system users. The obligatory "we're upgrading the site" would work well here.

The developers of the open source project leveraged middleware to gracefully handle requests while still allowing "internal" users to access the admin, and any logged in user having "staff" credentials still have full access to the site. Rad! This is a nice feature to have and one I can see every django app implementing.

All the cool kids are doing it, so why haven't you donated yet?

I'm always excited by creative projects like this one. Essentially, instead of designing the album art to reflect the music or the band, why not give the designer the control to match the music to their art? Love to see how this progresses.

I like to take photos. My family says the pics I take are artsy fartsy. Whatever. When it comes time to share them though, they want to see them. Now, as a web worker we all know there's a few photo sharing options out there. Ok, there's a LOT of sharing options out there. Let's just talk Flickr and Picasa for now though. Given the choice between sharing photos with friends and family on either flickr or picasa, I choose picasa. Overall, I'm a picasa fan myself (their windows desktop app is amazing). But for simplicity sake, and I know flickr is working on making their sharing features easier to use, picasa is simple enough for your mom or dad. And if you ever had to share photos online with your non-web savvy relatives, you know you need the most simple solution available, otherwise you're in for email, phone calls, and essentially help desk support. If you want community though - flickr is the place to go. No question.

Anyway, here's a great new django reusable application for displaying your picasa web photos on your site. It comes with all the goodies like templates tags, and admin utilities.

I try to financially support every open source project I use. "Try" is the key word here. Hey, at least I'm being honest.

The Django Foundation recently reached out to the community asking to help support current and future sprints. Considering I use django every day of my life, in one form or the other, I felt obligated to support the team. You should do the same. (via brosner)

Reading the post raised a question... is there ever going to be a Django Foundation website, or is djangoproject.com now the home of Django Foundation? Anyone... anyone?

Eric Florenzano rocks out his first two screencasts. The first is "Setting up a Django Development Environment" and the second is "Using Django-Pagination". Both are excellent and impressive for a first-go screencast noob.

I've done a few screencasts myself for the asp.net open source subsonic project, and I know that screencasts are not easy.There's a lot of prep and "runtime" eloquence needed to output an excellent screencast that is both entertaining and educational. Eric did a great job.

Btw - Is it me or do Eric and Rob Conery have the same exact voice? Maybe the same person? I jest.

An new open source diagramming tool to compete with users of Visio and OmniGraffle. Pencil runs on the Mozilla Gecko engine and can be run as a Firefox 3 app, which is rad. It can also run in standalone mode it appears, but only Windows and Linux users for now.