The Django developer team has released first beta version of the upcoming Django 1.5 to give its users an advance peek on the changes of the new version. The beta 1 test is not for production use but it is functional and you can already use it for deploying new Django sites. Aside from the beta test, there will also alpha test and other beta version to come in the near future.

The main reason for the release of the beta test for 1.5 is for users to report bugs and contribute in fixing the bugs. The final release will be out in a couple of weeks, probably the end of this month so you have a couple of days to check it and test it before the final Django 1.5 is out for download.

The main changes of Django 1.5 that are present in the beta test is that it now requires a minimum of Python 2.6 and does not support Python 2.5 anymore. If you are still using Python 2.5 and have current projects on queue then maybe it’s a best thing to wait first before your project to get done before testing the beta or update your Python to 2.5. The beta test also supports 3.0 and above but in experimental mode so read the documentation first before installing and testing the beta release.

You can download the Django Beta 1.5 in the Django website.

You can now develop a news publishing site using the Django framework with the Armstrong CMS. In the past years, Django enthusiast have mixed emotions when it comes to developing a news site based on the Django framework since the news plugins available are either too buggy or does not meet the criteria they wanted so most of them stick to WordPress or other more established CMS. Thanks to Armstrong CMS, you can now develop a publishing site with stronger and more functional interface and environment.

Armstrong is an open-source publish content management system that is built purely for the news organizations and publishing companies. It offers a rich media environment both to the developers and to the publishers and best of all – it is developed on top of Django framework.

It was first released last June 2011 and was received with warm reviews from developers and users, it was a product of the collaboration of the Texas Tribune and Bay Citizen, and a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It is aimed in providing a better environment for the publishers and the developers using the Python framework and the Django CMS platform.

Armnstrong is free for any organizations. You can contact Armstrong for the software and they will it to you. The source code is free so you can do your own tweaking. Armstrong does not provide its own hosting but you can contact them for help and advice since Armstrong is currently partnering with hosting providers.

To find out more on Armstrong, visit their official website:

http://armstrongcms.org/

Django CMS is unstoppable with its development. There is always a new plug-in, template or a completely new and overhauled Django CMS. The newest addition for the advancement of the CMS is Divio, a totally revamped version of Django that is advanced compared to other cms.

The Divio platform is a great app for managing hierarchical pages on a Django based website. It provides a seamless method of organizing contents especially to a content driven Django site like a magazine, blog or news site. The app also supports multiple languages and multiple sites like a WordPress MU and perfect for websites with a number of different users working in the same site but different access level.

Divio provides a clean management when it comes to navigations and links. You can use slug-based URL’s just like WordPress and Joomla and can also be integrated with other Django apps for a better functionality. When you use the Divio plugin, you also get the pre-installed plug-ins:

File
Flash
Google Map
Link
Picture
HTML Snippet
Teaser
Text
Video
Twitter

The Divio app is a great alternative in Django CMS especially if you are looking forward to a more sleeker CMS that is built in the Phyton and Ruby framework.

Remember our 5 useful Django tips? Here’s one more. Everyone hate spams – not the canned luncheon meat but the unwanted emails, posts and comments from our websites. It is a nightmare individually deleting spam comments in forums, feedback page and of course the “leave a message” page which is a favorite target for spammers and autobots.

With the rise of CMS like WordPress, it is easy for us to deploy blogs which helps us connect and interact with our customers and followers but some or mostly a lot of users are using the comment as strategy to create backlinks or affiliate links. There are tons of anti-spam plug-ins for WordPress now and filtering unwanted comments is now automatic. Django is still an infant CMS but it does not mean it is vulnerable to spammers, Django has 4 anti-spam package that you can use to eliminate auto-comments and spamming software that an cause our sites to lose its credibility.

1. Django Simple Captcha – The Django simple captcha plugin is the easiest and simplest captcha package available now for the Django CMS. Aside from being user-friendly, the plug-in is also very customizable and has an option to use images as captcha aside from the usual texts. The plugin has more than 10k of downloads now.

2.  Django Honeypot – A generic captcha plugin with more than 8k of downloads. It provides the typical text captcha.

3. Django Recaptcha Works – The plugin provides a form field that provides recaptcha services but the plugin is not stand alone and requires to be activated in the a google hosted API for the recaptcha. The plugin now has 12k of downloads.

4. Django Puzzle Captcha – The plug-in uses image that users has to arrange in order validate its comment or post.

The anti-spam / Captcha plug-ins of Django will help make the CMS not become another spam farming CMS. The community of Django users and expect the anti-spam plug-ins to be even better and the number to grow bigger.

The best thing about using CMS are the tips and tricks that you can use to improve the productivity of your projects. In Django development, it is important that files and folders are managed properly to speed up the development. Django is an amazing tool for web developer using Python, it is not yet as polished as WordPress but it lives on the policy of Don’t Repeat Yourself )DRY) which means you don’t have to code again and just use existing codes. It speeds up the development and develops a programmer to be more skilled and adept.

Here are 5 Useful Tips to maximize efficiency in Django:

1. Don’t put the project name as part of the import name – If you put the project name on the import name like project1.newweb.models instead of just newweb.models, you will not be able to reuse the app in new projects. When you also change the project name to a  new name, you will have difficulty changing for it is being used by import files.

2.  Do not Hard Code the Template files – When you transfer the dev site to another server. you will have to transfer the template files as well so hard coding them will require rewriting and it will be time consuming.

3.  Do not hard code individual links – Do not hardcode the links as well, if you make changes in your files, the links will be broken. Use the absolute link tag {% url %}, it will give you an absolute URL which will not break your existing links when moving the entire project file.

4. Use the debug toolbar – You can download a Django toolbar debugger like the Werkzeug debugger which allows you to edit Django on its core. It will save you more time when debugging files.

5. Use Third party Apps – Django has a growing community of programmers and 3rd party apps to help you work better with your projects are available whether for migrations or for social networking. Deploy your Django projects quickly by using 3rd party apps.

Are you planning to deploy new Django-based sites using the Django Social Network Plugins? You should know that Django are phyton-based and not all hosting provider supports them. It would also be a hellish process to be manually configuring the installation of python and ruby on rails in your hosting space via FTP using hosting providers that does not offer quick install programs.

Good thing GoDaddy supports python and also offers quick install through cPanel the Ruby in Rails script which supports Django. Although Django does not offer a 1-2-3 install script like WordPress and other CMS in hosting providers, it is much easier to install when the hosting provider supports Ruby and Python and GoDaddy is one the earliest hosting providers to offer Django / Python integration.

Another major reason why you should purchase your hosting and domain name services in GoDaddy now is that if offers discount coupon codes. For this month, GoDaddy offers $5.99 .COM Domains, for the first three then additional domains are just $7.99. Use the coupon code 599coms during the check to redeem the discounted price. The promo is available until Sept. 30, 2012.

If you are not looking for new domain names and just planning on purchasing hosting space for your Django site then you can just use the coupon code FUN20 to get 20% off when you purchase hosting services of GoDaddy. When you also purchase a hosting package from GoDaddy you automatically get a $200 free advertising credits to market your new Django website.

To get updated list of GoDaddy coupon codes, visit the Coupon Swapper site below:

http://couponswapper.com/coupon/godaddy.com/

Social networks plays an important role in the success of a website. It provides real time update and connect users with other users. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter provides an API code that can be embedded in any websites with just a few coding needs and CMS like WordPress provides plug-ins that makes installation of social networks as easy as one click of a button.

Django which is fairly new in the CMS does not have the vast community of WordPress where the plug-ins are piling up and the collections of social network plug-ins are huge. The availability of plug-ins is what makes a CMS click with its users and that has been the issue of Django a few years ago because it lacks the productivity tools like plug-ins other CMS boasts.

Last year, django-cms-social-networks was released and a handful of Django users has tried it and it is a pretty useful and functional social networking plugin just like its counterpart plugins in the WordPress CMS.

Django-cms-social-networks package includes the following:

Facebook Plugins:

Facebook Comments
Facebook Facepile
Facebook Likebox
Facebook Like button
Facebook Login button
Facebook Live stream

Twitter plugins:

Twitter Tweet button
Twitter Follow button
Twitter Tweet Hashtag button
Twitter Tweet to button
Embedded Tweets

Although it may lack on the functionality of social plugins found on the WordPress CMS, it is sufficient enough to support your Facebook and Twitter needs for a website. A new and updated has just been released on the Phyton website and we can expect that this plug-in will grow bigger as Django community gets bigger.

If social plugin is the reason why you are still not using Django then you got the social plugin perfect for your Django site.

You can download it here:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-cms-social-networks

Migrating a blog to a different blog platform is piece of cake for there are a handful of good blog exporting plug-ins and tools in the web but migrating a wordpress blog to a Django CMS is not as easy as 1-2-3 for there is no available plug-in yet to do the tricks.

Usually, the exporting of blog contents are from other blog platform to wordpress since wordpress is the leader in blogging CMS right now but you are probably like and one of the few who had been converted by Django to be an enthusiast of the so called responsive web design and decided to migrate your blog to the Django CMS.

Basically, the contents of your blog especially the posts are stored in a database called SQLand you can export them going to the tables. The problem is that there are tons of tables in mySQL of your wordpress blog.

The tables that you need to export from your wordpress blog are the following:

• wp_posts
• wp_comments
• wp_terms
• wp_term_taxonomy
• wp_term_relationships

After exporting the tables using phpMyAdmin, you can now import them in your Django database. If your web hosting provider offers PhpMyAdmin then import the database just like the usual sql database. If not, you can refer to the Django documentation for importing a SQL database.

You can code the SQL structure, here is how will it look like:

insert into blog_post
(id,
slug,
title,
pubdate,
moddate,
body,
draft,
closed)
select
wp_posts.id,
wp_posts.post_name,
wp_posts.post_title,
wp_posts.post_date_gmt,
wp_posts.post_modified_gmt,
wp_posts.post_content,
0,
0
from wp_posts
and post_type = ‘post’;

insert into comments_freecomment
(id,
content_type_id,
comment,
object_id,
person_name,
submit_date,
is_public,
ip_address,
approved,
site_id)
select
wp_comments.comment_id,
14,
wp_comments.comment_content,
wp_comments.comment_post_id,
wp_comments.comment_author,
wp_comments.comment_date_gmt,
1,
wp_comments.comment_author_ip,
wp_comments.comment_approved,
1
from wp_comments
where comment_approved = ’1′;

insert into blog_tag
(slug,
title,
description)
select
wp_terms.slug,
wp_terms.name,
wp_terms.name
from wp_terms;

insert into blog_post_tags
(post_id,
tag_id)
select
wp_term_relationships.object_id,
wp_terms.name
from wp_term_relationships, wp_term_taxonomy, wp_terms
where wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
and wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = wp_terms.term_id;

After the tables has been imported, you can now delete the WP tables (WordPress related tables) inside your Django folder. You will not be needing them anymore but make sure to save a back up in your hard drive for future uses.

Migrating your WordPress blog to Django is easy especially if your are well versed in mySQL and PhpMyAdmin. If you are totally new to mySQL then my advise is not to touch those SQL files for a single mistake may ruin your entire blog. You can either manually copy and paste the contents from WordPress to Django and lost some information like comments and subscribers or hire someone who can do the job for you.

Check out our next post, we will be providing tips on Django SEO and making your Django site Google friendly.

Django CMS has definitely come a long way and spawning amazing themes, templates and even Django-based CMS. The community of Phyton and Ruby on Rails are growing and the need of a better and feature-complete CMS based on the Phyton and Ruby frameworks are also rising and thankfully the Django contributors and developers are not failing us with upgrades and plugins.

One of the most feature-complete Django-based CMS plugin system available right now is the FeinCMS. It is simple yet extensive and gives you the features and tools that you need and nothing more to deploy a rich website. Unlike other Django CMS plugins which are pre-mature and lacking of important features or saturated with add-ons that are non-sense and useless and became complex and complicated, FeinCMS focuses on what Django users need; a simple and flexible CMS with focus on contents.

Here are the features of FeinCMS which makes it shine among other Django CMS:

1. Simple CMS

2. Very Flexible

3. Great Documentation

4. Supports JavaScript enhanced environment

5. Multilingual

6. Strong community of developers and contributors

Many web developers got turned off with Django CMS for it’s architecture is based on the Python and Ruby on rails and that is where FeinCMS bridges the gap for it works in a Javascript enhanced platform.

FeinCMS is not perfect and may lack the robustness that other Django-CMS has but it is straightforward and gives you the tools that you want for a rich text and image website. It may have some small issues on the installation and setting up but once you get on board it is like using a blog like CMS.

If you are looking for a Django CMS focused on contents like texts and images then FeinCMS is the CMS for you, although you can get the same features by using the TinyCMS add-on on your Django CMS, FeinCMS is still a must try and may actually be the ultimate CMS for you.

Django CMS has been the latest favorite CMS of web developers and it’s no wonder for it is one of the most robust and flexible in the web. Just like Joomla and WordPress, it has the WYSIWYG feature and comes with tons of themes and add-ons but since Django is still a new CMS it lacks on the ease of use when it comes to modifying designs.

If you are worried that you might be sacrificing the freedom to create your own designs when shifting to Django then Djeese is the perfect tool for you. Just like Artisteer for the Joomla and WordPress platform you can deploy websites without HTML and CSS knowledge on the Django CMS platform.

The Djeese is the easiest way to build websites with Django CMS. It gives you full control of the apps to add in your website and the CSS files and HTML used in the website. Djeese is not a rip off of Artisteer for it is a total package from hosting, getting domain, designing and deployment unlike Artisteer where it focuses mainly on the design.

Djeese provides you hosting then lets you choose the domain name and publish your websites within minutes. Djeese is the most customizable Django framework in the market.

Djeese is currently in beta test but they are already offering their services. You can sign up for free and test the Djeese platform or start paying their premium services for $39 a month which includes hosting, domain, 1gb storage and of course the Djeese framework.

Visit Djeese’s website for more info:

https://djeese.com