Announcing django-admin-histograms

This is just a quick post because it's already past midnight here. Last week I realized some potentially useful code that I extracted from the DjangoDose and typewar codebases. Basically this code let's you get simple histogram reports for models in the admin, grouped by a date field. After I released it David Cramer did some work to make the code slightly more flexible, and to provide a generic templatetag for creating these histograms anywhere. The code can be found on github, and if you're curious what it looks like there's a screenshot on the wiki. Enjoy.

Django-filter 0.5 released!

I've just tagged and uploaded Django-filter 0.5 to PyPi. The biggest change this release brings is that the package name has been changed from `filter` to `django_filters` in order to avoid conflicts with the Python builtin `filter`. Other changes included the addition of an `initial` argument on Filters, as well as the addition of an `AllValuesFilter` which is a `ChoiceFilter` who's choices are any values currently in the DB for that field. Despite the change in package name I will not be changing the name of the project due to the overhead in moving the repository (Github doesn't set up redirects when you change a project's name) and the PyPi package. I hope everyone enjoys this new release, as a lot of it's improvements have come out of my usage on Django-filter in piano-man.

As for what the future holds several people have indicated their interest in the inclusion of django-filter in Django itself as a contrib package, and for usage in the Admin as a new implementation of the `list_filter` option that is more flexible. Because of this my next work is probably going to be on implementing a custom `ModelAdmin` class that uses `FilterSets` for filtering.

You can find the latest release on PyPi and Github.

pyvcs .2 released

Hot on the heels of our .1 release (it's only been a week!) I'm pleased to announce the .2 release of pyvcs. This release brings with it lots of new goodies. Most prominent among these are the newly-added Subversion and Bazaar backends. There are also several bug fixes to the code browsing features of the Mercurial backend. This release can be found at:

• PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyvcs
• Github: http://github.com/alex/pyvcs/
  

If you find any bugs with this release please report them at:

• http://github.com/alex/pyvcs/issues

Thanks for all the contributions to this release, almost everything you see in this release is because community members contributed to it, hardly any new code in here is originally written by Justin or I.

We are hoping to have some exciting announcements for piano-man coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Enjoy.

Announcing pyvcs, django-vcs, and piano-man

Justin Lilly and I have just released pyvcs, a lightweight abstraction layer on top of multiple version control systems, and django-vcs, a Django application leveraging pyvcs in order to provide a web interface to version control systems. At this point pyvcs exists exclusively to serve the needs of django-vcs, although it is separate and completely usable on its own. Django-vcs has a robust feature set, including listing recent commits, pretty diff rendering of commits, and code browsing. It also supports multiple projects. Both pyvcs and django-vcs currently support Git and Mercurial, although adding support for a new backend is as simple as implementing four methods and we'd love to be able to support additional VCS like Subversion or Bazaar. Django-vcs comes with some starter templates (as well as CSS to support the pretty diff rendering).

It goes without saying that we'd like to thank the authors of the VCS themselves, in addition we'd like to thank the authors of Dulwich, for providing a pure Python implementation of the Git protocol, as well as the Pocoo guys, for pygments, the syntax highlighting library for Python, as well as the pretty diff rendering which we lifted out of the lodgeit pastbin application.

Having announced what we have already, we'll now be looking towards the future. As such Justin and I plan to be starting a new Django project "piano-man". Piano-man, a reference to Billy Joel, follows the Django tradition of naming things after musicians (although we've branched out a bit, leaving the realm of Jazz in favour of Rock 'n Roll). Piano-man will be a complete web based project management system, similar to Trac or Redmine. There are a number of logistical details that we still need to sort out, such as whether this will be a part of Pinax as a "code edition" or whether it will be a separate project entirely, like Satchmo and Reviewboard.

Some people are inevitably asking why we've chosen to start a new project, instead of working to improve one of the existing ones I alluded to. The reason is, after hearing coworkers complain about poor Git support in Trac (even with external plugins), and friends complain about the need to modify Redmine just to support branches in Git properly I'd become convinced it couldn't possibly be that hard, and I think Justin and I have proven that it isn't. All the work you see in pyvcs and django-vcs took 48 hours to complete, with both of us working evenings and a little bit during the day on these projects.

You can find both django-vcs and pyvcs on PyPi as well on Github under my account (http://github.com/alex/), both are released under the BSD license. We hope you enjoy both these projects and find them helpful, and we'd appreciate and contributions, just file bugs on Github. I'll have another blog post in a few days outlining the plan for piano-man once Justin and I work out the logistics. Enjoy.

Edit: I seem to have forgotten all the relevant links, here they are

• pyvcs on github
• django-vcs on github
• piano-man on github
• pyvcs on PyPi
• django-vcs on PyPi

Sorry about that.

Ajax Validation Aministrivia

Small administrative note, now that Github has it's own issue tracker users wishing to report issues with django-ajax-validation can now do so on Github, instead of the old Google Code page. Django-filter users can also report issues on its Github page, in place of the former system of "message or email me", which, though functional, wasn't very convenient.

Django Ajax Validation 0.1.0 Released

I've just uploaded the first official release of Django Ajax Validation up to PyPi. You can get it there. For those that don't know it is a reusable Django application that allows you to do JS based validation using you're existing form definitions. Currently it only works using jQuery. If there are any problems please let me know.