In case you missed it on the Django lists, RSS feeds, and other good tidbits – Simon Willison posted about, and made available, code to enable pretty much any Django based site to take advantage of OpenID.

He took a really interesting tack – instead of tieing OpenID into the authentication system that comes as a part of Django (contrib.auth), he overlaid the session tidbits with a middleware component that passes information into your views (and potentially your templates) as an extension on the request object. So instead of using the Django auth mechanisms for your OpenID users, you can let it ride without permissions and really even heavy tracking of those users just through their OpenID.

Obviously that may not be quite what you’re looking for, but in taking advantage of enabling some light level of authentication and identity to a public site, it’s really in a sweet spot.

I was really impressed with is how he packaged the whole kit for someone to take a look at, learn, and use. First off, there’s a great “single-page” documentation page right in the source, along with a .txt counterpart. The in addition to the core code itself, he packaged up a super-light django “example” application that most folks will be able to pull down and immediately fire up to get a sense of what it is doing and how to use it.

In working with Fritz to implement TrenchMice’s OpenID consumer support, we ran into a number of problems when we bound OpenID into the heavier weight contrib.auth setup. “Required” fields were not always returned from the OpenID provided when requested through the registration extensions, and he ended up iterating on the process a couple times to finally route the OpenID registration process into their normal registration process when there wasn’t enough information to fully process things.

Clearly, if you don’t need the heavier weight (contrib.auth) setup, Simon’s contribution will be a godsend to your application.

I was doing some upgrading of a Django site, getting rid of some of the pieces that are listed in the upcoming backwards-incompatible changes list. Learned some interesting tidbits…

For one, the AddManipulators (being deprecated as things move to newforms instead of the Manipulators setup) don’t play nicely with the removal of LazyDate and auto_add_now functionality from the older models setup. My terribly hack workaround, since I don’t use too many of the AddManipulators, is to tweak them when I run into it.

In particular I’m storing “creation_time” for some objects (which had been set to auto_add_now), and the AddManipulator decided that it was required, regardless of “null=True” or other goodies. I was overriding the save() method in the model – so I’m getting the data… but the Manipulator was being a pain. My tweak for the Manipulator went something like this:

book_manipulator = Book.AddManipulator()
for field in topic_manipulator.fields:
  if field.field_name.startswith('creation_time'):
    field.is_required=False

Which appears to have resolved the whole “creation_time_time” and “creation_time_date” fields being required and stuffing up my otherwise nicely functioning forms. Hopefully nobody else will run into this and need this hack (at least until I get rid of the AddManipulators in favor of the newforms setup) – but just in case, I thought I’d make it nicely available for Google.

At C4 last year, Brent gave a talk on Hybrid apps – and then graciously redid the same talk for the XCoders. Along those lines, Paul Bissex wrote a short bit about DjangoKit today.

Being a fan of that particular framework, I find it pretty interesting. It’s not quite in the realm of the hybrid application that Brent was talking about, but it’s definitely another take on how you can get some functionality on the desktop in a consistent way pretty darn quickly. I still think straight Desktop style apps that do the cool whizzy feedback will keep their place, but the possibilities for something like DjangoKit to make a quick appliance wrapper interface is really appealing to me. (DjangoKit on Apple TV?)

I haven’t tried out DjangoKit, but I’ve got all the prereqs (that would be a copy of PyObjC on my laptop). It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.