Unbracketed: Two New Django Community Sites

Two New Django Community Sites

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Two new Django-powered sites entered the tubes this week that should be beneficial to the Django community: DjangoFriendly and DjangoPost.

DjangoFriendly

DjangoFriendly is a site that provides a list of web hosts that provide explicit Django hosting. A simple voting interface common to Web 2.0 applications allows users to show their indicate their support or dismay for the quality of service provided by the various hosting companies. Built by Ryan Berg, the site has a slick design capturing the green shades that we all know and love from the official Django sites (home and book).

At this time the site does not accept submissions for new web hosts. Ryan generated the current set by mining the data on the Django wiki. A tremendously valuable feature is user-submitted reviews. I'm both pleased and surprised to see that WebFaction is (currently) at the top of the list. I've been with them for a while and have always been well pleased with the quality of support and the service in general.

In true Django fashion, Ryan took advantage of a few exisiting apps to provide the bulk of functionality: Jonathan Buchanan's django-voting and django-tagging, and James Bennett's django-registration. Ryan, like Jeff Croft, is one of those self-professed non-programmer designers who are a testament to what can be done with dynamic languages like Python and frameworks like Django with a little desire.

See Ryan's announcement post

DjangoPost

DjangoPost is a Digg-style site with a goal of focusing solely on Django-related news. This should be a great resource both for Django fans looking to keep up with the latest news as well as writers targeting the Django community. The site is created by Aware Labs who also created the Arkayne portal system.

The design is bland but purposeful and categories have been set up to help differentiate the content. In particular the styling of the voting controls and popularity counts seem a little out of place but that won't detract from the functionality of the site. The site offers a widget that can be embedded in any site and they are also making a code available specifically for Wordpress sites. In addition to filtering results from established sites like Delicious and Reddit, DjangoPost should provide a convenient central location for finding Django specific content.

See the announcement on Aware Labs