Surfing in Kansas

NOTE: This content is a little out of date. Some of the layout might be wrong, but the ideas are still relavent.

I went ahead today and figured that I would try out Pinax, seeing as it's been getting a lot of good press in the Django community lately. The talk from James Tauber at Djangocon was really good, and I certainly recommend checking it out. This is going to be a basic introduction to pinax.

First thing you need to do is grab the code from the pinax repository.

svn checkout http://svn.pinaxproject.com/pinax/trunk/ pinax

Once you have the code checked out you are already half of the way there. The only current external dependency is on PIL, the Python Imaging Library. Django itself has this dependency for the ImageField in forms. More than likely you already have this installed, so it shouldn't be a problem. If not, that is the only dependency of Pinax.

The directory structure of Pinax is pretty simple, copying from the README:

pinax/          contains a django project and templates
external_apps/  contains external re-usable apps brought in via svn:externals
local_apps/     contains re-usable apps that aren't yet externalized
core_apps/      contains non re-usable apps specific to pinax site
external_libs/  contains external libraries

The manage.py script inside of pinax links up all of the apps correctly for you. So all you need to do to get started is go into pinax/ and run ./manage.py syncdb. Then go ahead and run ./manage.py runserver and you should see the pinax welcome page! That is pretty awesomely simple to get up and running!

At this point, you now basically have an entire social application working on your box. That is pretty damn impressive. The pinax directory is the project directory in this setup. Then, all you have to do is swap out the templates, and you have your own site with the exact same functionality.

The main use case for me with Pinax is to take the groundwork that they're layed and throw a little bit of custom code on top. That is the goal of the project. They are trying to give you a really solid base that provides all of the generic functionality that 99% of websites need. From this base it is then incredibly easy and fast to get "yet another X site" going, wherein you then add the magic that makes your site unique.

A couple days ago I actually took my first Django site I'd ever done and converted it over to Pinax. It took all of about two hours, with the awesome help of James Tauber and Brian Rosner in the #pinax IRC channel on Freenode. They were helpful and I bemoaned the lack of documentation, so that's why I'm writing this up :) The site is now about 100x more powerful, and it's really cool the power of Pinax there.

I want to talk about my philosophy behind the usage of Pinax. The way that I've been thinking about it is basically it gives you the groundwork with some nice default templates for the apps. The way that you go about skinning the app is with the base.html and site_base.html in the pinax/templates/ directory. base.html allows you to change the basic layout of the site. This is where I changed out my CSS and Javscript code. Basically you don't want to be changing any of the block tags here, just HTML. I ripped everything out of the except for