Just a quick post since I have not had a chance to update in a couple of weeks.

Work has progressed, but a lot of bumps along the way. Particularly, with the decision to use MongoDB.

So, I’m going to go back and modify my earlier postings to reflect this particular change and others. Here is a quick summary:

Update
The excellent django-social-auth uses JOINs in the admin module so it will not work with MongoDB and django-nonrel. I intended to fork the project on github and see if I could make the necessary changes but I did not want to get off-track with the project.

It is on my list of to-dos for later.

Also, a lot of the django admin jobs (syncdb, validate etc.) were not working correctly. They were returning a lot of error messages and I have not even defined a model.

So, now I not abandoning MongoDB. Instead, I am going to try using the multiple database support in django. I will keep the user, groups, social-auth (and other packages) in SQLite and try to use MongoDB for everything I add to the project.

django-debug-toolbar
I was hellbent on using this tool but the current stable branch had a known issue with static pages and django errors were a plenty. I have updated the StackScript to download the latest dev version and the errors have disappeared.

There is probably more but I will leave it at that for now.

Theme
If you are anything like me (and not a designer) you end up spinning endlessly on the look and feel of a site. I have developed a number of other sites but the overall aesthetic and UX were never as good as I hoped.

Scratch all that. I hopped on over to themeforest and found a pretty slick theme for the site. I went in with a fairly well-formed idea on what I was looking for and the past week or so of using it has gone well.

My goal is to modify the theme as little as possible in the beginning in order to avoid going down the rabbit hole. It looks better than anything I could pull off on my own so I am going to leave it at that. The goal is functional site and a completed project not endless tweaking and frustration (sorry designers!).

django-social-auth
What a wonderful django package! It took a few days of tinkering to get all of the client keys/secrets etc. for the various social authentication sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn) and figure out the example application, but it does what it says on the tin.

For anyone starting out with this package, start with the example application as it will get you up and running much faster.

That’s it for now! I’m working on a the multiple database support in django now and building out the models to attach to a few forms. I am hoping to have a site that actually does something within the next few days.

I know this post is a bit weak but I did not want to drop this along the way.