Find Apps to Wire Up Your Django Site at Django Plugables

One of the major underlying design principles of the Django framework is that sites should be composed of numerous modules - each with a specific purpose. This is the same ethos that has fueled both the reputation and growth of UNIX-based operating systems. With the recent explosion and certain continual growth of Django, a wonderful natural side effect will be a proliferation of great components providing features common to web applications. The task then becomes searching for and filtering the results to find exactly what you are looking for. Django Plugables has stepped up to ease this process significantly.

Conceived by Revyver, the site has a clean, spiffy design. Yet another successful example of self-proclaimed designers learning Django and being productive with it in a jiffy. This already helpful site should morph into a very useful utility once their proposed features surface.

Current Features

The main pieces of functionality the site currently offers are:

• A list of hand-selected projects with brief descriptions.
• A list of developers and their collective projects.
  
• A handy page (dubbed EzayRepo) for doing quick repository lookups for your favorite projects.
  
• Feeds for recent commits (across all projects) and recently added projects.

Searching the Projects page is the main way to filter projects at the moment but this should improve tremendously with the addition of tagging. The developer listing is a nice way to give credit to generous community members who are making their work available. They've made clear that they are not focused on creating a social-network so only the most details about project authors are listed. This should help ensure that the site's usefulness as a utility can remain a priority for the site.

Coming Soon

Voting, comments, and per-project feeds will join project tagging as new features in future iterations. It is not clear to me whether users will be able to add tags to existing projects. I am personally hoping they will make a basic REST API available because the data on this site will dovetail nicely into a community resource organization tool I am creating. I think others might find the data useful as well - I can imagine in areas such as build systems and administration.

I am looking forward to utilizing this site as a time saver in the future. More importantly, the site should go a long way toward gaining exposure for well-written, useful projects which will in turn do its part toward accelerating the adoption of Django. Very nice job Bryan and Jen!

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