Tips #1

As I can't get to sleep after my last mug of strong black tea, I decided to write my first tips which will make your life easier.

Use consistent and readable coding convention. You know, class names start with capital letters, the variables and functions with small ones. The different words should be connected either using camelCase or by_underscores, but not mixed up in one project. Use triple double quotes """for documentation of functions""" and triple single quotes '''for commenting some code out'''. For readability it is convenient to limit all your lines to 80 symbols. If a statement is very long, put it inside the brackets and then separate into different lines (this is easier to manage than having a backslash (\) before the new line symbol). When debugging and adding print statement or similar, also add some comment like # DEBUG, which can be easily found later. If there is something to improve in the code, add a comment like # TODO with the description of possible improvement. These words are easily findable later. If you have a long list, tuple or dictionary of items, or a function with many arguments which don't fit into the limit of 80 symbols, separate the items with each per line, indented by one tab. Use comma even after the last item unless it is **kwargs. Put the closing bracket after all. This will let you easily rearrange the order or amount of items later.

view = my_special_view(
    request,
    arg1,
    arg2,
    arg3,
    )

Access items in administration faster. Instead of browsing through links and loading unnecessary pages before getting to the necessary ones, type in the URI of the required model directly. All lists of objects can be accessed by /admin/<app_name>/<model_name_in_lower_case>/

Use Python IDE and read Django source. Learn and use the interactive development environment, because it is usually a faster (and more attractive) way to learn how the functions work, than writing the code to the files first and checking the results in the browser afterwards. Use the dir() function for all objects to check the available methods and attributes, use the __dict__ attribute for model instances to check its field values, write for-loops for listing out specific attributes from model instances from different querysets. Interaction and visual representation always gives you some better understanding about the architecture than just Django documentation. Also when something is not clear, don't be afraid to read the source. Take advantage of Django being an open source project.

>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> for u in User.objects.all(): 
...     u.__dict__
... 
{'username': u'aidas', 'first_name': u'Aidas', 'last_name': u'Bendoraitis', 'is_active': 1, 'email': u'', 'is_superuser': 0, 'is_staff': 0, 'last_login': datetime.datetime(2008, 2, 27, 13, 43, 58), 'password': u'sha1$e55b5$9aa9485f4ad6fc7947e80b63e6d56519c73ac5bb', 'id': 1L, 'date_joined': datetime.datetime(2007, 3, 30, 20, 56, 7)}

That's it for this time. Now it's really time to sleep. :D