Servprise Dev Weblog

We started evaluating Satchmo for our main store page when we discovered that Satchmo 0.5 does not support the newforms-admin branch of django. Satchmo tracks the latest django trunk, which does get merged back into newforms-admin periodically. Unfortunately, Satchmo appears to augment or at least rely on the old-style admin site. As such, it will not run using the newforms-admin branch. This is a bit of an issue for us, since we have come to rely on having newforms-admin.

We'll probably set up a separate environment to test in, but even then, Satchmo may be problematic for us. It's one thing for us to have to chase trunk or newforms-admin revisions and a completely separate one to coordinate with a third party project that also relies on an unreleased/unstable version of django. We have run into issues in the past with different developers in our own team running "svn up" at different times and running into inexplicable issues with the code, only to find out it was related to update timing. It's something we do not look forward to doing with another remote team.

The project does look interesting though and we'll likely weigh in on it more as we further evaluate it.

While converting one of our internal django-based applications to the newforms-admin branch, we were snagged by a little gotcha. After following the migration docs, we fired up our app and immediately upon accessing it, were presented with AlreadyRegistered exceptions. These exceptions are thrown if you attempt to register the same model twice with the same admin site instance. We found this odd, given that we were quite sure that we only registered the code once, in exactly one place.

The culprit turned out to be our use of "from models import *" in our URLConf. The newforms-admin docs currently have all of the admin registration at the bottom of the models file. The idea of putting them there is to guarantee that the code gets executed at some point. The problem is guaranteeing that it gets executed exactly once. By django loading up the models file, the registration was executed once. By us calling the star import in our URLConf, the registration code was being called again, causing the exception.

In the aforementioned docs, the authors mention having a preferred location for the admin site configuration. We ended up heeding it and created an admin.py file to contain everything. This file is now star imported from our URLConf to ensure the registration does proceed. However, by splitting them, we prevented multiple registration and better decoupled the admin site configuration from our models.

Anyway, this is a little gotcha if you're moving to newforms-admin, which will likely be a requirement for the 1.0 release of django.

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the 0.2 release of the WebReboot Nagios Plugin. This release features massively improved configuration, logging, and documentation. If you're using the 0.1 release, we highly recommend you upgrade.

For more information, please check out the changelog, where you can also download the release.