... or how we redesigned Merar`s website

If you follow me on Twitter maybe you have noticed that a week ago(to be more precise 11th of March) I tweeted about the new version of Merar. Unfortunately it took me 9 days before I find some time to post about what we do and what we expect. Before to continue with the changes I should mention that in "redesign" I mean some changes in the business model and logic as in the interface design(which I have to say is much simpler and intuitive then the previous one), so lets start with the changes:

• The website is now split in two major sections: Investors or as we call it "Provide Funds" and Entrepreneurs or "Get Funds".
• We have simplified the registration process so now you are just a few clicks away from becoming a member.
• The process of submitting project was made simpler and some helpful hints are added to guide you during it.
• There are also small changes in the messaging system, the member profile and some more.

We put big effort on usability and SEO on the design stage of the project and according to the final product and member responses we have done a good job.
My special thanks to all guys from Magic who were part of this project - the credits belong to them.

Now if you are still reading just go and try it. Sell your business(idea), invest your funds or just check it out. I`ll be glad to hear(read) your opinion.

I am happy to say that I successfully passed the entry tests for a PhD student. So now I am part of SULSIT(State University of Library Studies and Information Technologies) PhD program. The program`s name is "Automated Systems for Information processing and information management" and my thesis will be "Research of the current methods and technologies for web sites and web application development". The dissertation have to be in Bulgarian but I will try to POST the table of content translated as well with a short resume for each chapter.
As always any ideas and suggestions are welcome.

... this is the "Post on request" for February 2011

Preface: I have to admit that I was expecting a bigger interest in the "Post on request" topic but probably my blog is too young for this but I think I will try again(soon or not). The more important thing is that Jonas Obrist is the indisputable winner of this month "contest".

Features: One of the most useful features in the next Django CMS must be the ability to copy placeholder's content between different language version of one page. For example imagine that you have a home page with several placeholder each with several plugins/snippets inside(latest news, featured products etc.) when creating new language version of the page it is really annoying when you have to add this one by one.

One other feature requested by my colleague Miro is a little opposite of the one I want, he want to be able to add different page templates for each language version of the page. I also find this useful because sometimes your language version are not fully mirrored even on the same page.

Bugs: I am not sure that this is actually a bug but I think it is bad for SEO so I will mark it. If you have a multilingual website, once you have the language set in the cookie the same page is displayed no matter whether you have the language code in the URL. For example, "/en/news/" equals to "/news/". This causes a duplicate content which is considered bad for SEO and also is misleading because every visit of "/news/" with different language in the cookie return different content. I have done some fix for this that will be presented in the next post.

Conclusion: Thanks to all participants and to the guys at Django CMS - you do a really amazing job, I hope that you will like the features I proposed and that we will be able to see them in the next version. Comments and replies are welcomed as ever.

In the last few weeks I have been little busy(and suffering from lack of inspiration) so my blog lacks of new posts but I see that there are people visiting it(especially for the Django CMS stuff) so I am willing to start a "Post on Request" practice.

The idea is simple - I will collect post theme requests in the first three weeks(or 21 days) of every month and after a choose based on your votes( and my decision ) I`ll go out with a post on the selected theme by the end of the week. Please keep your question in the following areas - Django, Django CMS, Web Development. Question in other areas will be considered too, but may stand out of my knowledge area. You can place your request here or check the list and vote for another one or just comment this post.
I hope that you will find this initiative interesting and join it.

... or what to do in case that you need a special design for your choice fields

The problem: Few posts ago I talked(wrote) about Django forms ChoiceField and with dynamic values and now it is time to take a look at the front end and how we display these values to the user. I will use the code from that post:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    my_choice_field = forms.ChoiceField(choices=MY_CHOICES)

By default Django provide us with a simple drop-down list as visual representation of the choice field. Just create and instance of the form in your view, pass it in the context:

def my_view(request):
    form = MyForm()
    return render_response('template.html',{'form': form})

and then display it in the template using {{form.my_choice_field}}. Speciality: For most cases this drop-down works just fine but sometimes this is not enough. Lets say that instead of drop-down list we need a radio buttons. There are two ways to achieve this - using a custom widget or playing with the template tags and the ChoiceField object. The first solutions is more suitable if you have a repeatable interface for several fields. In my case this was field specific so I chose the second one as faster for implementation. Solution: You can access the field object and its choices calling the field respectively field.choices properties of the form element in the template. Here is an example

<ul>
{% for choice in form.my_choice_field.field.choices %}
  <li>
    <input type="radio" name="my_choice_field" value="{{choice.0}}"
      {% ifequal form.my_choice_field.data choice.0 %} 
         checked="checked"
      {% endifequal %}/>
    <label for="">{{choice.1}}</label>
  </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

This allows you to specify custom styles/HTML for every element and also to distinct first and last elements using forloop.first and forloop.last - for more information you can check Django documentation about the for template tag

Final words: I did not have the chance to measure the speed difference between these two methods I mentions but I intend to post a also an example of the first one(using custom widget) and a "benchmark" between them both. If someone has already done this please post the results and your opinion about this.