simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with django

In case anyone else is wondering why their utf-8 email is not coming out as it should when using Django...

Non-ascii character sets are a major pain when writing code to send email. They're not impossible by a long way but they do take some digging to figure out why your nicely formated utf-8 Chinese is coming out in garbled characters, tracing code, examing email headers... Oh the joy. So it does not help when your framework of choice (Django) decides it knows that you really want a certain type of text encoding, even if you are writing your own…

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Like many starting out in websites and databases my first experience was with MySQL. I had no choice since the hosting service I used only offered MySQL. This is still the case for a lot of hosting - you get the standard LAMP stack and nothing more. I had read on the web that everyone is using MySQL, so how bad could it be? I was forgetting the maxim that quality and popularity are inversely proportional. BTW: it's not really popularity in this case - it's the most users - think Windoze.

Anyhoo, I struggled through the nightmare that is…

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Bare with me it's a long story...

When deleting an object I was getting this error from Django:

'RelatedManager' object has no attribute '_collect_sub_objects'

The reason was an attribute name clash on a base class. Finding the reason took some time so here's the low down in case any one else runs in to this.

In one app I had a model Company:

class Company(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=1024)

and in another app I had a model AdClient:

class AdClient(models.Model):
    company = models.ForeignKey(Company, related_name='client')

Then some time later I wrote a new app inheriting from Company as:

class Client(Company): name =…

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The Guardian set up a Django site to crowdsource analysis of the released (and redacted) MPs expenses claims. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a good piece on the lessons learned.

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When I first set up this site back in 2005 I looked around for a blogging platform and chose ExpressionEngine. After years of bad experience with PHP (it's such a mess) I was relucant to use a platform based on PHP but EE is a good and well thought out system. (BTW EE is about to release version 2.) So there we were.

Always in the back of my mind was: "You know how to do this. Why don't you write your own system?" Well life and business got in the way and I never got around to it.…

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If you get the error “AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘xyz’” in Django. It probably means you’ve added a new app but forgot to put the __init__.py file in the app’s directory.

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I recently switched from the Django magic-removal branch to the trunk post-magic-removal. I was getting this bizarre error:

Well, it took me a while to figure out. Notice that the directory name used for the Django distribution…

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Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave a talk on Django at Google for BayPIGgies.

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Snakes and Rubies Chicago, 3 Dec. 2005: The creators of Django and Rails each gave talks and discussed web frameworks. Download the video and audio here

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