Nothing But Code Since New Year
Since my New Year's resolution post, I've been conspicuously absent. Absent, not just from my own site, but absent from a host of other things. My family, working on my book, helping with Samba's web sites. Everything has taken a back seat as our team at WPNI has been pushing hard to meet some initial deadlines. Most of what we've been working on has been internal releases for review in preparation for public release, but we will have a public launch next week for a video project I'm very excited about. Rob teased the new site, too so I don't mind doing the same here. :-)
Working at WPNI has been a wild ride so far. We really are working across all properties here. We've got stuff launching on Slate, Newsweek, and Washingtonpost.com in the next couple months. Most of what we've done so far has been our team working with Newsweek and Slate editors to help them flesh out some project ideas they had lying around. The coming video app is really our first project that feels more like the usual stuff you would expect from our group. It's got video in multiple formats, blogging, nice database integration, and we're using Flash in ways we never have before. Jesse Foltz is a monster of a Flash-video-design freak (even if he does like using Windows. ;-) I think people will be amazed by his work on this new app.
And though we don't have a lot to show yet, I've been writing an amazing amount of code lately. A couple of pieces might prove useful to others, and I plan to talk to Rob and our group about the possibility of open sourcing one or two of these bits. One is the build system I'm using, written in Python. It works off a makefile-like Python script, which I've been calling web-make or wake for short. We've got multiple Subversion directories -- one for each site with site-specific code, one for common Django code, our own version of Django based on 0.95 (with newforms added, for example), and then our apps directory. Using a "wakefile" -- a file containing a Python dictionary with build info -- I can build a site from multiple SVN checkouts with a single command. It's got hooks for pre- and post-deploy so you can add site-specific functions in Python to your wakefile.
It's made life much easier for me. Hopefully, I can get that code out for others to use as well. And as we start to release, I'll try to write a bit about more about what we're doing with Python, Django, and other open source tools.
Link | Posted by deryck on January 30, 2007 | 0 comments
