How can I build a django homepage with updatable content?

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How can I build a django homepage with updatable content?

I an building a kind of social network (think of it as last.fm, but gaming related). I want to have a homepage which will feature:

site news, announcements etc. in the main part
featured items in the right sidebar
player of the week in the right sidebar

I am trying to think of a way not to be hand coding these every time they need to change, which I understand is terrible design. However, I can't think of much.

I realize I need some kind of simple blog engine for the site news and such, but what about the featured content in the sidebar? Should there be a table in the database containing the featured items of the week? I think that will pollute my models.py with unnecessary stuff.

Please share any ideas.

+1 A:

There are lots of ready-to-go solutions ie.

Pinax - great package of reusable apps,
Django CMS - not so great, but could be useful.
Django's static pages - for basic stuff :)

I'd try pinax first - it has all of what you need.

As for your featured stuff - it all depends on what exactly you need, on your content. If you need something special you'd probably finish up writing this stuff by yourself, or overriding parts of ready-to-go solutions.

bx2 2010-09-26 12:57:34

Could you specify a couple of Pinax apps that would help me accomplish what I want? I am looking at the documentation and can't see anything immediately useful for this purpose (besides a blog).

FrontierPsycho 2010-09-26 13:06:09

django-announcements, django-blog, django-mailer, django-registration, django-threadedcomments, django-flags - look here for details: http://pinaxproject.com/docs/0.7/#documentation-for-individual-apps. Also it will not build the whole thing for you - if you need specyfic features you will have to write them yourself, pinax will only cover the basics.

bx2 2010-09-26 13:20:19

Thanks, I think subconsciously I was hoping I'd find something ready to go. I'm starting to think about rolling something of my own.

FrontierPsycho 2010-09-26 23:43:17

Good idea :) btw. if my answer helped you someshow, you could mark it as correct one :P

bx2 2010-09-27 09:33:35

Featured Items and Player of the Week will depend (usually) on your project specific Player / Item models. It shouldn't take long to program these small pieces.

As far as news, there are quite a few different solutions out there. Here's one that I've created (because I can't think of a better one off hand):

http://github.com/monokrome/django-news/

The best bet with django is to find the smaller apps you might be able to leverage, and then write your own project with your custom wants/needs in mind.

monokrome 2010-09-26 22:59:28

I think this is what I've been looking for, howevewr there doesn't seem to be any documentation on how to integrate your app into my site. I am also considering rolling my own front page, but I'd like to give django-news a try. Any tutorials?

FrontierPsycho 2010-09-26 23:42:11

I plan on adding some tutorials when it has hit beta version 0.9 finished, but this is a pretty straight forward django app. Just add an include of django.contrib.news.urls to your URLs, and then add django.contrib.news to your INSTALLED_APPS.

monokrome 2010-10-11 04:07:12

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How can I build a django homepage with updatable content?

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