Starter Projects

One of the core features of Pinax is the inclusion of various starter projects. There are three very different types of starter project, though, and knowing the distinction is important to understanding how best to use them.

The three types of Pinax starter project are:

• foundational
• demo
• out-of-the-box

Foundational projects are intended to be the starting point for real projects. They provide the ground-work for you to build on with your domain-specific apps. Examples of foundational projects are zero and account.

Demo projects are really just intended to showcase particular functionality and demonstrate how a particular app works or how a set of apps might work together. You probably wouldn’t use them to kick off your projects (other than to get ideas) and they aren’t intended to be used for real sites. Examples of demo projects are social and sample_group.

Out-of-the-box projects are intended to be useful for real sites with only minor customization. That is not to say they couldn’t be highly modified, but they don’t need to be, beyond things like restyling. Examples of out-of-the-box projects are company and code.

Bundled Projects

Pinax comes with bundled starter projects which can be used to bootstrap your project. These starter projects can be used when you run setup_project:

pinax-admin setup_project -b <project> mysite_project

zero

• Inherits: Django project layout
• Type: foundational

This starter project is what we call Layer Zero. This is not much more than what you get from django-admin startproject, but follows our conventional project layout. Here’s the directory structure you should see:

<project-root>
    apps/
        __init__.py
    deploy/
        __init__.py
        fcgi.py
        wsgi.py
    fixtures/
        initial_data.json
    locale/
        ...
    requirements/
        base.txt
        project.txt
    static/
        ...
    templates/
        _footer.html
        homepage.html
        site_base.html
    __init__.py
    manage.py
    settings.py
    urls.py

Our project layout provides you:

• a home for your apps
• deployment files
• initial data (for handling sites.Site model)
• project requirements files for use with pip
• a home for your site static files (using django-staticfiles)
• very simple templates directory

The rest of the files are what you’d expect from Django. They’ve been modified to hook up the project infrastructure provided.

Apps included:

• django-debug-toolbar
• django-staticfiles
• django_compressor

account

• Inherits: zero
• Type: foundational

This starter project builds on zero integrating pinax.apps.account for managing user accounts. Users can login, signup, reset password, change email addresses, change password and change timezone.

Apps included (excluding parent project):

• pinax.apps.account
• django-mailer
• django-email-confirmation
• django-timezones
• django-openid
• django-uni-form

basic

• Inherits: account
• Type: foundational

This starter project adds user profiles and notifications. User profiles is handled by idios and notifications by django-notification.

Apps included (excluding parent project):

• django-announcements
• django-pagination
• django-notification
• idios

blog

• Inherits: account
• Type: demo

This starter project demos integration of components required to build a blog site. biblion is used to handle blog posts and dialogos handles comments.

Apps included (excluding parent project):

• biblion
• dialogos

static

• Inherits: zero
• Type: demo

This project just serves static media and templates with no models or views. It is a great starting point for doing HTML mockups while taking advantage of the Django templating language. It uses pinax.views.static_view mounted at /. For example if you access /test.html it will render templates/test.html. Directory paths, i.e., /a/, will render /templates/a/index.html.