Getting Back to IT

Life has become much more interesting of late. With two or three interns in The Open Bastion office periodically I am revisiting basic software development practices to try and explain them. I am using it as an opportunity to bring my own skill-set up to date, and it's immense fun to actually get to grips with, even though quite a challenge in the face of intelligent (and sometimes daunting) questioning from the interns. We are all learning a lot, me included.

Because we want to be able to build flexible web systems we have decided to use django CMS as our base system. The editing interface may not represent the absolute zenith of design (though the 3.0 release, currently in Beta, looks rather better), but it appears to be a solid piece of technology and it is capable (when applied by a team including design skills) of producing attractive and easily-edited web content. Even with a relatively puny SQLite database and with the Django debug toolbar switched on you can see how people with little deep understanding of information technology could nevertheless use it to build their own web resources fairly quickly.

The original attraction of django-cms was its ability to maintain flexible content via its flexibly extensible plugin system. This is a valuable part of keeping content separate from presentation—and, of course, there's nothing to stop you writing plugins to use the same data as other Django code that's already part of your site. For a crowd of tech-heads the most difficult part will be the presentation and styling. Who knows, perhaps a design intern will want to get in on the ground floor.

Our first task was to get to grips with a solid but simple workflow. We have now settled on the simple but effective git branching model proposed in Vincent Driessen's excellent paper. Of course since everyone is learning git we are making all the usual mistakes and stumbling along at times. It's reassuring that whatever mistakes you do make are usually recoverable. Nowadays I sometimes even remember to checkout a new branch before committing development changes.

We are currently at the stage of creating a solid build and learning how to work with plugins. I have managed to extend the tables plugin to allow drop-down style selection (albeit with a somewhat inflexible mechanism) and gained much insight thereby. We still face the challenges of testing and deployment

Sadly now I have to go back to writing the code to create the slots for the DjangoCon schedule, but I hope to write more later.