In this part we will improve the Bookstore application: what I am going to show is how easy it is to add support for enabling comments for a book without writing from scratch another comment system (as you may already now, avoid rewriting things is the core philosophy of Pinax and Django).

Basically, you could add this feature by using one of these two approaches (there may be other ones, but these are the most common):

• Django comments framework
• the django-threadedcomments system, that - as suggested by its name - it offers support for comments in a threaded fashion

You will implement a commenting system in the application you are developing by using the django-threadedcomments system.

Setup

You need to make sure that, in your settings file, you have the django-threadedcomments system enabled:

PROJECT_ROOT/settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'threadedcomments',
'threadedcomments_extras',
...
'bookstore',
)

if you didn’t customize things, you should have this two applications already enabled (not commented).

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In this part we will improve the Bookstore application and we will see how easy it is to add support for three core features that any web 2.0 sites is supposed to offer:

• support for avatars
• support for pagination
• support for user profiles

Adding support for avatars

In Pinax you may use two kind of avatars for your users (in both case you may manage them from the Avatar page: http://localhost:8000/avatar/change/):

• gravatars
• custom avatars

In the first case Pinax will render your avatar using the gravatar you have associated to your email from the Gravatar web service. In the latter Pinax will use a custom avatar you have uploaded to the Pinax web site.

For managing avatars in the Pinax application you are building, you will use the Avatar application (be sure you are importing it in your settings file, the default for this is true so you shouldn’t do anything there).

Adding support for avatars in your Pinax application is just as easy as to do the following two things in your templates:

• import the avatar tags library {% load avatar_tags %}
• use the {% avatar %} tag in your templates

For the Bookstore application it will be enough to use the avatar tag in this way: {% avatar book.adder 40 %}

Where the first parameter is the user for which you want to render the avatar, and the second parameter is the avatar size in pixels.

So you need to do this in your templates (books.html, book.html):

PROJECT_ROOT/bookstore/templates/bookstore/books.html template

{% extends "bookstore/base.html" %}
{% load i18n %}
{% load avatar_tags %}
...
        <!-- alternate -->
        {% if books %}
            <table class="bookstore">
                {% for book in books %}
                    <tr class="{% cycle odd,even %}">
                        <!-- meta -->
                        <td class="meta" >
                                <div class="avatar" >{% avatar book.adder 40 %}</div>
                            <div class="details">{% blocktrans %}added by{% endblocktrans %} <a href="{% url profile_detail book.adder.username %}">{{ book.adder }}</a></div>
...

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(Note that, if you completed the other parts of this tutorial before the date of this post, you need to move the PROJECT_ROOT/templates/bookstore directory in PROJECT_ROOT/bookstore/templates: so now you will have a PROJECT_ROOT/bookstore/templates/bookstore directory. I did so for a better deployment experience, and doing so I am following the Django best practices. If you are reading the pdf version of the tutorial or the reST documentation, then this documentation is already updated with the templates directory in the right place).

In this part of the tutorial I will show how easy it is to enable your application for internationalization with Pinax.

Enabling internationalization for a Pinax application is just the same procedure for enabling it for a Django application.

You can find a complete discussion about Django’s internationalization mechanism here
Be sure to read this discussion before going on with this tutorial.

To enable internationalization for your application you will need to complete three steps:

• use translation strings in Python code and templates
• create language files
• change settings

Let’s see how to apply them to the Bookstore application you are developing.

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In this part of the tutorial you are going to create the core of the bookstore application, with all the pages that gives access to the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) features. And you are goint to plugin this basic application into Pinax.

After finishing with this part you will have the core of the bookstore application working as desired. You will be able to:

• see a list with all the books in the bookstore
• add a new book
• update and delete your books
• see a list of all books added by you
• see a list of all books added by a user

In the following parts you will add some more goodness like localization, pagination, avatars, profiles, voting, tagging, feeds, comments, notifications, and flags for contents, but basically this part is the most important one and it is the way you can create from scratch an application and make it enabled for Pinax.

Creating the application

Before doing anything, give execute permissions to the manage.py command:

chmod 777 manage.py

Now create the bookstore application:

./manage.py startapp bookstore

Now that you have created the application, it it time to add the models, installing it in the Pinax project and syncing the database.

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I will assume you are installing Pinax v0.7 on a Ubuntu 9.04 box, but this procedure - with a few modifications, should work well on every Linux box. For Windows please refer to the Pinax official site or - rather I highly reccomend to use VirtualBox, and to create an Ubuntu 9.04 Virtual Machine, so you will be able to follow step by step this tutorial.
There are ready images like this one, to make things even easier.

As suggested from the official installation procedure, the release bundle has everything you need for running Pinax.
What is not included is:

• Python;
• Python Imaging Library (PIL);
• SQLite.

Ubuntu 9.04 includes Python 2.6, PIL 1.1.6 and SQLite 3.6.10, so you have everything. If you are using another Ubuntu version or a different Linux distribution, please verify to have all of this software. You will install and use for this tutorial Pinax v0.7 (latest release at the date of this post).

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In the last weeks I was studing Pinax , an open source platform for building Django applications. While I enjoyed a lot learning how to develop software with this framework, and I am going to happily use it for a series of projects, I found a bit difficult to get documentation about it, if not reading the source code and the (few - at this time) documentation on the project web site.

When I started, I decided to write a test application for understanding the Pinax philosophy before going for real development projects. I think it can be very useful for other developers new to Pinax to write down my experience. This is why I am going to write this tutorial, hoping it will be really useful for the Django/Pinax community.

While reading my posts, if you find errors or you have suggestions to give, please don’t hesitate to put some comment in my blog’s posts: I will try to update the tutorial, trying to make it a good resource for people willing to learn to develop with Pinax.

Intended audience

You may easily follow this tutorial if you have some Python and Django experience.
But even if you are new to Python and Django, you may reasonably follow this tutorial picking a bit of Python and Django confidence from the following resources (note, however, that you should have programming experience and you should not be new to web development).

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