Pinax cheat sheets

I have a few friends that I’m bringing up to speed pretty quickly on Django. The basics are going well, and I’m providing the foundations for the effort. To take advantage of all the good stuff out there, I’ve started diving deeply into Pinax, and then wrapping some automation around it with Fabric to make it really easy to work on new apps and projects.

That’s the whole reason I posted gist 284927 yesterday on setting up a remote app server for a pinax project with Fabric.

The biggest hurdle that I have with the fellows I’m bringing up to speed is them understanding what’s IN the project that I’ve already slapped down. Even a basic pinax project has a huge amount of complexity for the newer django developer – it’s pretty overwhelming. To try and mitigate that complexity, I’ve started a side project making Pinax cheat sheets. (http://github.com/heckj/pinax_cheat_sheets).

This is not intended to replace Pinax documentation, and in fact I hope that I can eventually tweak these around and put them into the pinax project. I have a huge respect for it (and I use it), so here’s a little bit of detail for contributing back.

I am very happy to take on any changes, edits, updates, etc – from others. There’s a lot of folks who’ve worked very hard to build all these components, and I’m not writing from the perspective of the creator, but of the “code spelunker”. I’m sure I’ll get some of this stuff wrong – so if you see something, please let me know.

I’d ideally love to receive contributions in the form of pull requests from GitHub. Just fork that project, make your edits, and when you’ve pushed them back up – send me a pull request. I don’t promise that I’ll include everyone’s contributions, but to be honest I don’t expect to be too darn picky.

I’ve written the cheat sheets in markdown, mostly because I know it, and secondarily because it renders nicely as HTML when viewed through GitHub.

The start of the project has the following cheat sheets up:

• django.contrib.auth
• django.contrib.contenttypes
• django.contrib.humanize
• django.contrib.sessions
• django.contrib.sites
• pinax.templatetags
• notification

I have a bunch more external apps to go before I hit the internal Pinax apps. I’m working through everything that’s included in a Pinax “basic_project”.

• django_openid
• emailconfirmation
• mailer
• announcements
• pagination
• timezones
• ajax_validation
• uni_form
• staticfiles

And then the internal apps:

• basic_profiles
• account
• signup_codes
• about
• django.contrib.admin