I’me developing a web application that has some elements of social network. The problem is that there is almost no web frameworks to start from. The only one I know is Pinax.
Pinax is Django based. Is a bunch of independently developed components taped together with some some code. It actually provides a lot of the boilerplate code that is boring to code (making friends, sending invites, showing requests, etc, etc, etc…).
The problem is that the documentation is a blog post from 2008 with almost no documentation giving only a tutorial on how to set up your development environment, you are forced to use virtualenv to get the components installed, instead of only dragging components to your django folder and updating the installed apps setting and it depends on PIL, the python imaging library, that has no stable port for OS X since the Intel transition, and is a f’ing train wreck to get to work no OS X.
I like django, a lot, but I spend more time fighting pinax than actually moving forward with my project.
Comments
8 responses to “Airing of Greevences: Pinax”
django isn’t the right tool for that job.
also, pinax has some great documentation at http://pinaxproject.com/docs/0.7/
The problem with the documentation is that isn’t comprehensive, and most of it is only related with installing. A framework requires as much functionality as documentation, and pinax only documentation goes as far as creating a dummy project.
darn – I had intended to post the link to the dev branch documentation – http://pinaxproject.com/docs/dev/ which is a lot better – it even covers the individual apps sorry about the mistaken post
Sorry you had problems (although I’m confused by some of the issues: pip install PIL has worked for years on OS X)
You definitely want to be using the latest dev release, not 0.7. And regarding documentation, the reason most of the Pinax docs just deal with installation is that the apps themselves have documentation.
James, I agree that maybe I’m not that fluent in pip and easy install. The thing is, I can’t find information on how to mix and match applications (e.g. having a basic project, with elements of private beta, I don’t know what apps each project imports).
one last link for you, had to wait till I got home – check out pillow – it’s a fork of PIL configured to run better in virtualenvs – it isn’t the only way to get PIL working, but it is the easiest I’ve found
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow
JP, I got PIL running using pip. I had to easy_install pip first, but it did work what james said.
Thank you anyway!