Favorite Django Tips & Features?

Run a development SMTP server that will just output whatever is sent to it (if you don't want to actually install SMTP on your dev server.)

command line:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

Use Jinja2 alongside Django.

If you find the Django template language extremely restricting (like me!) then you don't have to be stuck with it. Django is flexible, and the template language is loosely coupled to the rest of the system, so just plug-in another template language and use it to render your http responses!

I use Jinja2, it's almost like a powered-up version of the django template language, it uses the same syntax, and allows you to use expressions in if statements! no more making a custom if-tags such as if_item_in_list! you can simply say %{ if item in list %}, or {% if object.field < 10 %}.

But that's not all; it has many more features to ease template creation, that I can't go though all of them in here.

Everybody knows there is a development server you can run with "manage.py runserver", but did you know that there is a development view for serving static files (CSS / JS / IMG) as well ?

Newcomers are always puzzled because Django doesn't come with any way to serve static files. This is because the dev team think it is the job for a real life Web server.

But when developing, you may not want to set up Apache + mod_wisgi, it's heavy. Then you can just add the following to urls.py:

(r'^site_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',
        {'document_root': '/path/to/media'}),

Your CSS / JS / IMG will be available at www.yoursite.com/site_media/.

Of course, don't use it in a production environment.

Use xml_models to create Django models that use an XML REST API backend (instead of a SQL one). This is very useful especially when modelling third party APIs - you get all the same QuerySet syntax that you're used to. You can install it from PyPI.

XML from an API:

<profile id=4>
    <email>joe@example.com</email>
    <first_name>Joe</first_name>
    <last_name>Example</last_name>
    <date_of_birth>1975-05-15</date_of_birth>
</profile>

And now in python:

class Profile(xml_models.Model):
    user_id = xml_models.IntField(xpath='/profile/@id')
    email = xml_models.CharField(xpath='/profile/email')
    first = xml_models.CharField(xpath='/profile/first_name')
    last = xml_models.CharField(xpath='/profile/last_name')
    birthday = xml_models.DateField(xpath='/profile/date_of_birth')

    finders = {
        (user_id,):  settings.API_URL +'/api/v1/profile/userid/%s',
        (email,):  settings.API_URL +'/api/v1/profile/email/%s',
    }

profile = Profile.objects.get(user_id=4)
print profile.email
# would print 'joe@example.com'

It can also handle relationships and collections. We use it every day in heavily used production code, so even though it's beta it's very usable. It also has a good set of stubs that you can use in your tests.

(Disclaimer: while I'm not the author of this library, I am now a committer, having made a few minor commits)

Just found this link: http://lincolnloop.com/django-best-practices/#table-of-contents - "Django Best Practices".

When passing variables from a view to a template the response dictionary can become tedious to type out. I find it nice to just pass all the local variables at once using locals() .

def show_thing(request, thing_id):
    thing = Thing.objects.get(pk=thing_id)
    return render_to_response('templates/things/show.html', locals())

(Not a hidden feature per se but nevertheless helpful when new to Python and or Django.)

Edit: Obviously it's better to be explicit than implicit but this approach can be helpful during development.