Sessions at DjangoCon US 2011 with slides on Thursday 8th September

Django forms are really powerful but there are edge cases that can cause a bit of anguish. This talk will go over how to handle many common solutions not currently described in the core documentation. It will also cover some useful third-party libraries and will end with clarifications about what the state of form features will be in Django

Outline:

Handy tips
- Turning non-required model fields into required form fields
- Overriding clean methods
- Overriding save method
- Calling forms the easy way in views
- Custom field definitions
- Dynamically adding fields
- Formsets
- Testing forms

Third Party Libraries that make your life easier
- django-uni-form
- django-floppyforms

The future
- Forms refactor in Django 1.4
- Documentation improvements

Time will be left for Q&A.

A tour through the systems that power ep.io, the Python hosting platform, from the array of daemons powering the system, to how redundancy is set up, and also covering general best practices for hosting Django sites yourself.

At ep.io, we spend all day finely tweaking and polishing our deployment systems, and this talk will go through some of the parts of our archtecture, show you some of our code, and also advise you on deploying Django sites on your own servers.

Topics covered include our use of ZeroMQ for redundant communication, the difficulties of running services with transatlantic latency, our extensive use of Eventlet for asynchronous, concurrent I/O, how we've used (and modified) pip and virtualenv, and how we've leveraged class-based views to make our API part of our normal URL structure.

In addition, there will also be some advice on how to run sites on your own servers, including what programs to use, how to lay things out, and sensible backup strategies.

Love or hate them, the top python scraping libraries have some hidden gems and tricks that you can use to enhance, update and diversify your Django models. This talk will teach you more advanced techniques to aggregate content from RSS feeds, Twitter, Tumblr and normal old web sites for your Django projects.

OUTLINE

• lxml fu: etree vs html
• lxml faves: iterlinks, prev/next, strip_tags, linepos
• incorporating xpath
• building your xml views/templates with lxml (this bullet is optional: may not have time but would love to hear if folks might find this useful)
• learning how to build a good JSON API handler: what you can learn from some amazing api handlers when you have to build your own
• feedparser, HTMLParser, re: the quick & dirty ways to parse when LXML isn't fast enough

This talk aims to briefly introduce the core concepts of caching and covers the best practices of using Django's cache backend.

"Are you caching?" is a question asked early on in any yarn on web scaling advice. These conversations are much better steered by asking a more open and difficult questions "What is your caching strategy?" and “How are you implementing it?” This talk aims to briefly introduce the core concepts of caching and quickly moves to cover the best practices of using Django’s cache backend. We will let the audience know what the important questions to ask are, give them advice on how to implement the right answers, and when even the built-in core backend isn’t enough, point them to more advanced techniques and the right third party tools.

Important questions covered:

• Why am I caching in the first place? Do I have to?
• What is your caching strategy?
• What are examples of good caching strategies?
• Where do I put my cache code?
• How dynamic is my content? Could I use a published cache?
• Should I cache Django objects, or raw data?