Teaching an Old Pony New Tricks: Maintaining and Updating and Aging Django Site

Teaching an Old Pony New Tricks: Maintaining and Updating an Aging Django Project DjangoCon 2010 Shawn Rider PBS Education

What is TeacherLine?

The Rebuild Challenge
In 2006 the TeacherLine sites were powered by Cold Fusion.
A complete rebuild was needed.

Several technologies were considered:
Ruby / Rails
PHP / Some PHP Framework
Python / Django

Things About Django That Made Us Happy
Speed of Development
Code Quality
Modularity of Framework
Django Admin
Active Community
Python!

Things People Said About Django That Hurt Our Feelings

Beta frameworks are not
“enterprise ready”!

Django won’t last; the project will die!

Nobody around here knows Python!

TeacherLine Rises Again
Over 4 months, 2 developers built the new TeacherLine site.
It launched December 12, 2007

TeacherLine Rises Again
Features in relaunch:
Course Catalog
CMS for localized content
Staff Admin
Support Ticketing System
Robust Permissions/Roles System
Profiles
Graduate Credit Management System
eCommerce
API for Remote Integration

Features Added Since the Relaunch
Message Queue
Named URLs
Test Suite
New File Storage Backend
Virtual Environment Project Structure
Robust Visual Reports

Major Apps Added Since the Relaunch
Facilitator Scheduling Tool
Capstones Course Tools

Deployment Changes Since the Relaunch
Adopted Virtual Environments
Moved from traditional to cloud hosting

Things That Worked for Us
Django is opinionated in a generally good way.

A culture of self-criticism.

Isolate functionality into reusable components.

Always use URL tags in templates.

Our multi-deployment configuration solution turned out to be a good idea.

Mistakes We Made
Never override the User model.

Mistakes We Made
Make tests right away.

Mistakes We Made
Never underestimate the Admin.

Mistakes We Made
Manipulators made us shy to fully leverage Forms.

Things Are Getting Better
Continuous ORM Improvements
Django Forms are now awesome
Enhanced security protections
Authorization backends

Upgrading the Framework
To take advantage of framework upgrades, you must schedule the work in your project.

Sell the upgrade to the Uppers:
It will lower the cost of future development
It will alleviate a pain point felt by staff processes

Facilitate the work:
Make the most of your VCS
Use tests
Take your time

Things We’d Like to Improve
Remote API
Adopt Haystack/SOLR instead of Djapian/Xapian
Email backends
DB master/slave and sharding
Leverage Django Admin features better

Ponies We Still Want
Multi-configuration support out-of-the-box
A better way to know when Django’s modules are completely loaded into memory
More robust event handling (Signals++)

Thanks & Kudos
The Django Project
The core devs and all the contributors.
The Django Community
Everyone developing Django apps and community sites.
The current TeacherLine team:
Nowell Strite (@nowells), Tareque Hossain (@tarequeh), Ron Cox (@monkyhead), Sam Deng (@samdeng)

Teaching an Old Pony New Tricks: Maintaining and Updating and Aging Django Site

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