Exploring Pinax - Part 2

This is the second of a series of articles where I register what I learn about developing Web applications with Pinax.

In the first part I got the sample website running. Now I’m going to add a section for a new application.

I will develop a simple paste bin where people will be able to store small ammounts of text and send it to other people. I will try to write it as a reusable Django application and leverage Pinax’s features.

I will call this application Oxybeles: an implement for throwing things, because when you paste something online you usually want to “throw” it to someone. Besides, a Greek name fits a Pinax app.

Creating a new tab

The first thing I wanted to do was to create a new tab in the site interface for the paste bin app. After searching a little I found out that the website tabs are defined in templates/site_base.html and that the actual text is stored in localizable resource files such as locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/django.po.

So I edited templates/site_base.html and inside the {% block right_tab %} section I inserted this line, among the others:

<td class="tab rtab_pastebin"><div><a href="#">{% trans "Paste Bin" %}</a></div></td>

After that I thought I should edit locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/django.po. But it seemed autogenerated, so I went to learn how that works. Django’s documentation is great. I quickly found out that internationalization is very easy and automatic in Django. While I’m developing I can just use the English text. If I want to update the translation files I can use this command at the project’s root dir:

$ python manage.py makemessages -l en

The first time, I got a message complaining that xgettext was not found. I corrected that by installing gettext:

$ sudo aptitude install gettext

After that, I generated the makemessages command again and I could see that locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/django.po was updated. I learned that I should also compile those files. But I reckon I’d only need to do that before a release, not during development.

So, with only a single new line in a template, I got the Paste Bin tab:

In the next step I will develop a basic view for this tab and maybe start the model object.

Your feedback is welcome.

About these ads