Over the past 6 years, I've built a lot of things with Django. It has treated me very well, and I have very much enjoyed seeing it progress. I got into Django when I helped the company I was working for transition away from a homegrown PHP framework toward something more reliable and flexible. It was very exciting to learn more about Django at a time when the ecosystem was very young.

When I started with Django, there weren't a lot of pluggable apps to fill the void for things like blogs, event calendars, and other useful utilities for the kinds of sites I was building. That has changed quite a bit since then. The ecosystem has evolved and progressed like mad, and it's wonderful. We have so many choices for simple things to very complex things. It's amazing!

Unfortunately, during this whole time period, my development efforts have shifted from creating my own open source projects to share with the world toward more proprietary solutions for my employers. If it's not obvious to you from my blog activity in recent years, I've become very busy with family life and work. I have very little time to give my open source projects the attention they deserve.

For at least 4 years, I've been telling myself that I'd have/make time to revamp all of my projects. To make them usable with what Django is today instead of what it was when I built the projects. Yeah, this time has never showed up. Take a look at the last time I wrote a blog article!

I have decided to disown pretty much all of my open source Django projects. I've basically done this with one or two of the more popular projects already--let someone else take the reigns while I lurk in the background and occasionally comment on an issue here or there. I truly appreciate those who have taken the initiative here. But there are still plenty of projects that people may find useful that need some attention. I'm putting it up to the community to take these projects over if you find them useful so they can get the love and attention they need.

Here is a list of Django projects that anyone is free to assume responsibility for. Most of them are silly and mostly useless now. Some are unpleasant to look at and could use an entire rewrite.

• django-articles - Blogging engine, which I wrote for my own site many years ago. This one could probably use a full rewrite. [already maintained by John Leith].
• django-tracking - Visitor tracking to see what page a user is on and their general location based on IP. Update 2015-07-28: Adopted by bashu.
• django-axes - Track failed login attempts and ban users. This one is already pretty much owned by aclark4life
• django-reploc - Designed to show representative/retailer locations. I only used it on one site, but it was designed to be generic.
• django-smileys - To easily replace things like :) and B-) with emoticons or whatever. Pretty lame. Update 2015-07-28: Adopted by bashu.
• django-pendulum - A very basic time-tracking app. I believe this has already been forked and used for some more interesting commercial projects.
• django-bibliophile - A way to let your visitors know what you're reading.
• django-watermark - Some utilities to add watermarks to images. Update 2015-07-28: Adopted by bashu.
• Any other Django-related project you see at https://github.com/codekoala?tab=repositories or https://bitbucket.org/codekoala/

The fact that I'm giving up these projects does not mean I'm giving up on Django. On the contrary, I'm still using it quite heavily. I'm just doing it in such a way that I can't necessarily post my work for everyone to use. I honestly don't expect much of this disowning effort, since the projects are mostly stale and incompatible with recent versions of Django. But please let me know if you do want to take over one of my projects and care for it.

I've been working on some neat changes to django-articles recently, and I've just released version 2.1.1. The most noticeable feature in this release is Auto-Tagging. Since I feel like I've described the feature fairly well in the README, I'll just copy/paste that section here.

The auto-tagging feature allows you to easily apply any of your current tags to your articles. When you save an Article object with auto-tagging enabled for that article, django-articles will go through each of your existing tags to see if the entire word appears anywhere in your article's content. If a match is found, that tag will be added to the article.

For example, if you have tags "test" and "art", and you wrote a new auto-tagged Article with the text:

This is a test article.

django-articles would automatically apply the "test" tag to this article, but not the "art" tag. It will only apply the "art" tag automatically when the actual word "art" appears in the content.

Auto-tagging does not remove any tags that are already assigned to an article. This means that you can still add tags the good, old-fashioned way in the Django Admin without losing them. Auto-tagging will only add to an article's existing tags (if needed).

Auto-tagging is enabled for all articles by default. If you want to disable it by default (and enable it on a per-article basis), set ARTICLES_AUTO_TAG to False in your settings.py file.

Auto-Tagging does not attempt to produce any keywords that magically represent the content of your articles. Only existing tags are used!!

I sure had fun programming this little feature. I know it will be particularly useful for my own site.

Another item I'd like to mention about this release: I've finally started using South migrations in this app. This is a move I've been planning to make for quite some time now.

Head on over to http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-articles or use pip install -U django-articles (or easy_install django-articles if you must)! Enjoy!

I've spent a little more time lately adding new features to django-articles. There are two major additions in the latest release (2.0.0-pre2).

• Article attachments
• Article statuses

That's right folks! You can finally attach files to your articles. This includes attachments to emails that you send, if you have the articles from email feature properly configured. To prove it, I'm going to attach a file to this article (which I'm posting via email).

Next, I've decided that it's worth allowing the user to specify different statuses for their articles. One of the neat things about this feature is that if you are a super user, you're logged in, and you save an article with a status that is designated as "non-live", you will still be able to see it on the site. This is a way for users to preview their work before making it live. Out of the box, there are only two statuses: draft and finished. You're free to add more statuses if you feel so inclined (they're in the database, not hardcoded).

The article status is still separate from the "is_active" flag when saving an article. Any article that is marked as inactive will not appear on the site regardless of the article's "status".

On a slightly less impressive note (although still important), this release includes some basic unit tests. Most of the tests currently revolve around article statuses and making sure that the appropriate articles appear on the site.

Some of you who prefer to use git for your version control needs and were following the django-articles mirror on GitHub may have noticed some strange activity recently. I noticed today that the GitHub mirror was out of sync with the other mirrors, and I took a bit of time to investigate the problem.

I thought, for some reason, that I might be able to quickly and easily bring it back into sync if I just deleted the repo, recreated it, and pushed my changes to it. That didn't work. This means that all of you who were once following the project there are no longer following it, and I only realized that side effect after I had clicked the delete button. I apologize for this inconvenience.

In the end, it turned out that I had some things misconfigured with git on my box. I have resolved the problems and have brought the mirror back into sync. Please let me know if you run into any problems with it!

One of the features that I really like about sites like posterous and tumblr is that they allow you to send email to a special email address and have it be posted as a blog article. This is a feature I've been planning to implement in django-articles pretty much since its inception way back when. I finally got around to working on it.

The latest release of django-articles allows you to configure a mailbox, either IMAP4 or POP3, to periodically check for new emails. A new management command check_for_articles_from_email can be used to process the messages found in the special mailbox. If any emails are found, they will be fetched, parsed, and posted based on your configuration values. Only articles whose sender matches an active user in your Django site will be turned into articles. You can configure the command to mark such articles from email as "inactive" so they don't appear on the site without moderation. The default behavior, actually, is to mark the articles inactive--you must explicitly configure django-articles to automatically mark the articles as active if you want this behavior.

One of the biggest things that you should keep in mind with this new feature, though, is that it does not currently take your attachments into account. In time I plan on implementing this functionality. For now, only the plain text content of your email will be posted. Please see the project's README for more information about this new feature.

Please keep in mind that this is brand new functionality and it's not been very well tested in a wide variety of situations. Right now, it's in the "it works for me" stage. If you find problems with it, please create a ticket or update any similar existing tickets using the ticket tracker on bitbucket.org.

You can install or update django-articles using the following utilities:

• pip install -U django-articles
• easy_install -U django-articles
• hg clone http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-articles/ or just hg pull -u if you have already cloned it
• git clone git://github.com/codekoala/django-articles.git

Enjoy!

P.S. This article was posted via email