Top Reusable Django Apps From Django Pluggables

Posted on 12/12/10 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Posted in Web Development

Here they are the top list of reusable django apps as shown on the Django Pluggables website. This list comprises of the top apps found and used within the django community. From database migrations, search, debugging, tagging and pagination - using these apps will save you loads of time in development.

South

South is an intelligent database migrations library for the Django web framework. It is database-independent and DVCS-friendly, as well as a whole host of other features. If you've ever ran into a situation where migrating your database models has become a pain, look no further than leveraging South. When you put together a simple model like the one below.

You can make a simple alteration, like adding additional data, changing a name or adding relationships to the existing models.

from django.db import models

class Knight(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    of_the_round_table = models.BooleanField()
    dances_whenever_able = models.BooleanField()
    has_beer = models.BooleanField(default=True)

With a simple running of the command, ./manage.py schememigration package --auto, you can create the difference automatically. Then, when you're ready to migrate a database, simply run ./manage.py migrate and south will take care to pull the database up to the latest migrated changes.

Django-Debug-Toolbar

Debug toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response. Whenever you're working in django, having this toolbar is essential and necessary app to have setup.

Haystack Search

Building a website that is capable of searching inventory, documents and page content is absolutely essential - and when it comes to searching across all models available to your customers, you want to build something fast, reusable and get it out the door. For this reason, we have an app called Haystack. Haystack gives you features like spelling suggestions, search result highlighting, indexing non-database content and its ability to swap out search backends like Solr, Whoosh and Xapian.

Django Admin Tools

Apart from your everyday administrative overrides, django admin tools gives you that extra bit of edge when it comes to giving your projects more custom administrative control. You can leverage admin tools to provide menus, custom dashboard settings, widgets and more. Every one of our projects comes with custom administrative panels that fits your brand and we make it a point to customize frequent workflows into your administrative panels.

Piston

Piston is a small app that lets you build RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs) for your sites and projects. It even comes with built-in OAuth authentication that you can leverage to integrate with your favorite social networks. Apart from OAuth, you get features like built-in service throttling, form validation (ala lovely Django Forms) as well as the ability to generate documentation using Django's views and template engine.

Why we use Django

Here at Threefold Studio, we've chosen to use Django because we can create very powerful web applications and services with very rich applications in no time. Our code is clean and reusable, it's unit tested and its fully customizable to the needs of our clients. When a client changes their mind and wants something else, we can simply drop an app, add a few, or change a model - migrate their data and deploy in no time. We love django and we would love to see others benefit from it.