Hacking for fun and profit

Update: Feedjack has been released!

Some nights ago I wrote a little Planet replacement in Django called FeedJack. There is still no source code available but I’ll release it as open source as soon as I polish it a little and write docs (if a software has no docs, it doesn’t exist).

You can see it in action in ChichaPlanet, probably one of the first “planets” after Planet Gnome and Planet Debian. It has some features in common with PlanetPlanet:

• It downloads feeds and aggregate their contents in a single site
• The new aggregated site has a feed of its own
• It uses Mark Pilgrim’s excelent FeedParser

But FeedJack also has some advantages:

• It handles historical data, you can read old posts
• It parses a lot more info than PlanetPlanet, including post categories
• It generates pages with posts of a certain category
• A cloud tag/folksonomy (hype 2.0 compliant)
• It uses Django templates

Something to note is that, as I posted some days ago, I am very busy with “real” Django projects (real as in we get paid for them), so I wrote this planet thing in 2 nights, and most of the time was spent with the feedparser script that runs in cron than in the django app itself, since it provides generic views, syndication and paginators for free.

But I found something very strange. Note that this is my first attemp to write a “releasable” django app, everything I have done in Django is web applications that will be deployed in one server (note that I said web applications, for you people that think that django is only good for CMSs), so I never had to worry about making anything easy to install to end users. What I wanted to do with FeedJack was to tar the apps/feedjack/ directory so the user just untars the distribution file in apps/ and configure his settings and urls files and that was all.

But I couldn’t do that.

The obvious thing to do was to put the apps/feedjack/ directory in the pythonpath, so I could do “import feedjack.views” in the code, instead of “import my_project.apps.feedjack.views”. The first import works from a python interpreter, it also works when called from another app, but when I try to import it from a running django instance, it fails. I really don’t know if there is some magic in there, Hugo told me on IRC that there isn’t, so I am puzzled. I really don’t want to distribute an app that forces the user to have a “my_project” project, that’s ugly, and sadly that’s what is suggested in Django’s Do’s and Dont’s for Application Writers:

Separate generic apps that you are intending to distribute into a different project from other projects which might happen to use that app. To avoid clashes, use a name for the project which is unique to you, the author, such as one based on a domain name that you own.
…
This will enable your urls.py module to be fully portable.

There has to be a better way.
(And note that I am not alone).

Any suggestions?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 12:33 am and is filed under chicha, chichaplanet, django, feedjack, python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.