Customization
As more sites are built using Pinax, more best practices will emerge, but for
now what we recommend is:
- Always work off a stable release. The most current release is 0.7.1.
- Use the pinax-admin setup_project command.
- Make necessary changes to the settings.py and urls.py files in your
copied directory.
- Change the domain and display name of the Site in the admin interface.
- Develop your custom apps under your new project or anywhere on Python path.
- Develop your own templates under your new project.
Choosing a Project
Pinax provides several projects to use as a starting point for
customization. Depending on your development style, you may prefer one project
over the other.
- basic
- This project comes with the bare minimum set of applications and templates to
get you started. It includes no extra tabs, only the profile and notices tabs are
included by default. From here you can add any extra functionality and
applications that you would like.
- cms_company
A very simple CMS that lets you set up templates and then edit content,
including images, right in the frontend of the site.
The sample media, templates and content including in the project demonstrate
a basic company website.
- cms_holidayhouse
A very simple CMS that lets you set up templates and then edit content,
including images, right in the frontend of the site.
The sample media, templates and content including in the project demonstrate
a basic site for holiday house rentals.
- code
- This project demonstrates group functionality and the tasks, wiki and topics
apps. It is intended to be the starting point for things like code project
management where each code project gets its own wiki, task tracking system
and threaded discussions.
- intranet
- This project demonstrates a closed site requiring an invitation to join and
not exposing any information publicly. It provides a top-level task tracking
system, wiki and bookmarks. It is intended to be the starting point of sites
like intranets.
- private_beta
- This project demonstrates the use of a waiting list and signup codes for
sites in private beta. Otherwise it is the same as basic_project.
- sample_group
- This project demonstrates group functionality with a barebones group
containing no extra content apps as well as two additional group types,
tribes and projects, which show different membership approaches and
content apps such as topics, wiki, photos and task management.
- social
This project demonstrates a social networking site. It provides profiles,
friends, photos, blogs, tribes, wikis, tweets, bookmarks, swaps,
locations and user-to-user messaging.
In 0.5 this was called complete_project.
- zero
- This project lays the foundation for all other Pinax starter projects. It
provides the project directory layout and some key infrastructure apps on
which the other starter projects are based.
pinax-admin setup_project
Pinax provides you with pinax-admin, a command line utility. With
pinax-admin you can quickly generate a cloned project. For example, to get
started quickly with Pinax you could simply do the following:
(mysite-env)$ pinax-admin setup_project mysite
Or if you want to use the basic project base you could do:
(mysite-env)$ pinax-admin setup_project -b basic mysite
Settings You Will (Possibly) Want To Override
Pinax-specific:
- PINAX_THEME
- CONTACT_EMAIL
- URCHIN_ID
- BBAUTH_APP_ID
- BBAUTH_SHARED_SECRET
- SITE_NAME
- MAILER_PAUSE_SEND
- SERVE_MEDIA
- ACCOUNT_OPEN_SIGNUP
- ACCOUNT_REQUIRED_EMAIL
- ACCOUNT_EMAIL_VERIFICATION
- EMAIL_CONFIRMATION_DAYS
- LOGIN_REDIRECT_URLNAME
General to Django:
- DEBUG
- TEMPLATE_DEBUG
- LOGGING_OUTPUT_ENABLED
- ADMINS
- MANAGERS
- DATABASE_ENGINE
- DATABASE_NAME
- DATABASE_USER
- DATABASE_PASSWORD
- DATABASE_HOST
- TIME_ZONE
- SECRET_KEY
- DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL
- SERVER_EMAIL
- SEND_BROKEN_LINK_EMAILS
- EMAIL_HOST
- EMAIL_HOST_USER
- EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD
- EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX
- LOGIN_URL
base.html versus site_base.html
In the sample projects, templates/base.html is intended for overall page structure
whereas templates/site_base.html is intended for adding site-specific content that
is to be found on all pages (things like logo, navigation or footers).
If you are writing a theme to be used across multiple sites, you should modify
base.html, not site_base.html. If you want to keep a particular theme
but modify content for a specific site, you should modify site_base.html.
Changing Avatar/Gravatar defaults
By default Pinax assigns to users the Gravatar icon and uses the Gravatar icon
system. If you want your own personal site avatar default, simply go to the
settings.py in your project root and add these two lines of code:
# avatar controls
AVATAR_DEFAULT_URL = MEDIA_URL + '<our_custom_avatar.jpg>'
AVATAR_GRAVATAR_BACKUP = False