Pinax, rapid web-app development on top of django / python

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

31 25 17 years ago

ubernostrum2• 17 years ago

Headline is a bit misleading. Pinax aims to be:

1. A collection of Django applications which cover the common features of a variety of different types of sites, vetted for functionality/reusability/etc.

2. Some bits of glue to pull together the various applications for different types of sites.

So, for example, you want to build a social-networking site. Regardless of the specific focus of your site there's lots of infrastructure you're likely to need/want because it comes with that territory (user signups, "friending" and other relationships, profiles, ratings, etc., etc.). So Pinax offers a set of pre-vetted apps which provide that functionality, and some bits to make it easier to plug them all together.

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

I agree the headline is a bit misleading.

They have included a number of more CMS-y bits in the development version, however: http://pinaxproject.com/docs/dev/customization.html

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

better like that ?

(was pinax, CMS functionality on top of python / django)

joshsharp2• 17 years ago

I have heard anecdotal evidence that Pinax is a real pain to work with, because a lot of the apps are half-complete or not truly pluggable. My friend told me "in the time we've spent trying to get them to work as advertised we could've written it ourselves."

flashingpumpkin• 17 years ago

i have to second that. we've tried having a good time with pinax, it ended being a pita though and we went the roll your own way.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

Thank you both, you have probably saved me a bunch of time.

Did you stick to django though ?

californiaguy4• 17 years ago

Pinax is a monstrous pain in the ass to install and use for the following reasons:

1) Bad documentation. 2) Bad installer (installer??? Django apps should be installed with cp and tar.) 3) They attempt to bundle everything with their cheeseball installation package yet I still spent 3 hours compiling external dependencies (not just PIL) which was a major pain in the ass. 4) Not compatible with Python 2.4, the default on a huge number of servers and this is not stated anywhere in the docs.

I haven't deployed the code to a production web server with mod python or WSGI but I'm betting it's going to be a major pain in the ass, too.

The Django apps that I've written from scratch, every single one of them, could be tarred and dropped into a working Django 1.0/WSGI environment with zero effort other than setting up the base environment - I know because I've done it many times. In my opinion they should really rethink this concept of an "installer". It's a red herring for productivity and doesn't even do what it says it does because there are external dependencies to compile and a bunch of undocumented details to sweat over.

rufugee• 17 years ago

Wow...this it the first criticism of Django-related anything I've read on HN. Bravo! I welcome more honest critiques.

forkqueue4• 17 years ago

Dependencies are the exact reason a plain tarball isn't good enough. They're why package management was invented.

For http://kutoken.com/, our Django hosting service, we've spent quite a while packaging Django apps into .deb format, so our users can for example just 'apt-get install python-django-tagging' to have tagging support in their app (for a really simple example). Now I've got used to working with a system like that, I really couldn't go back to individual tarballs and setup.py and the like.

apgwoz2• 17 years ago

The idea of django pluggables in general is a misnomer. There are very few applications out there that can be plugged in without a lot of extra work. I was hoping that pinax would establish a set of conventions for making this not the case, but it sounds as though there is plenty of room for improvement.

megaman821• 17 years ago

Is it pluggable like a Drupal module, no. But I wouldn't say adding a line to your installed apps, adding a line to your urls, and then creating your template files is a lot of extra work.

I do agree it would be nice if there was a convention for template names and block names from within those templates. Which would reduce the work on the previously mentioned creating of your template files.

larrykubin• 17 years ago

I tried out Pinax last year. It's sort of like Drupal in that it gives you the building blocks for building your own community site or content management solution. It's a great idea, but unfortunately there were a lot of bugs at the time. Anyone tried it recently?

ubernostrum2• 17 years ago

Well.

My personal opinion as someone who works a lot with Django but not (for now, at least) Pinax is that they hit the problem, common in the open-source world, of starting to hit the popularity curve before they were really ready for it. Pinax started getting attention and flattering blog posts and such when there were still several issues to work out with the way Pinax itself was packaged, how applications were vetted for inclusion, etc., etc.

Fortunately, popularity has also brought them plenty of new contributors, which means this stuff either has been worked out (e.g., for things like packaging -- now using pip with custom bootstraps, and requiring every app to be installable through it, which is pretty much the ideal) or is being subjected to a flurry of activity.

babul• 17 years ago

If Pinax is such a pain, can anyone make any recommendations on what to use/do if you did want to build a social-networking site using Django?

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

Roll your own.

There are lots of projects (including Pinax) that you can reference to help you figure out how to do things yourself.

http://djangoplugables.com/

...is a site that lists django related projects. You can also just google stuff. There are a bunch more on Google Code and on github.

Pinax, rapid web-app development on top of django / python

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