Starting a Django Conventions Project and Reference

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During the last month I have proposed some conventions for Django, mostly in the realm of templates. In doing so I have looked around for other documented places where conventions are mentioned. I haven't found a really good reference for Django conventions. Brian's post was a good example of reusable app conventions, and the Pinax Project is a great reference implementation. However, I couldn't find any simple reference for regularly used conventions in the Django world.

I don't know if this will be useful for people, but I think this goes along the whole convention/pattern ideal. If we all use a common naming, syntax, and style in places where they can be arbitrary, then we gain a lot of value of being able to understand whats going on in others code. So I have started a project that hopefully will act as a reference for Django Conventions.

Currently it is pretty sparse, but I think that having that document in any form is a great step. I'd love to hear some feedback, and it needs a lot of work, so feel free to email me or leave comments here with your additions and criticisms. If this idea becomes useful, I would be fully in support of including it in the Django Documentation or something along those lines as well, but I don't know how "official" this will really be. For the moment just consider it my hair brained idea of how things should be done :) Cheers.

Comments

1 Malcolm Tredinnick says...

A number of these look useful, some will be slightly arbitrary and some need better phrasing (e.g. models.py and views.py assumes I would only ever have one file for those. They can be modules). However, that's all small fry.

You should probably avoid reinventing a coding style, though, and contributing.txt in the Django documentation already has a preferred ordering. Matching what Django does is probably not a bad idea in that respect. You more or less mimic that already, but putting a link in for all the cases wouldn't be a bad idea.

Posted at 5:56 a.m. on December 4, 2008

2 Camron Flanders says...

A page in the wiki on djangoproject.com seems a more appropriate place for this.

Posted at 3:53 p.m. on December 6, 2008

3 Preston Holmes says...

Wherever it lives, here or wiki - this is great for people just starting (like me) to develop good habits early.

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