For those of you unable to attend, Google has released the videos from the recent Django Conference (see our coverage). Highlights include the DjangoCon keynote from founders Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, as well as the always hilarious Cal Henderson talking about why he hates Django.

Most of the panel talks are available as well, including some of the more technical panels that we missed like Schema Evolution or the What’s New in Newforms-Admin? panel.

There are few videos missing, but we expect Google will post them in the very near future. Head over to this link for the latest list of what’s available.

To whet your appetite, here’s the Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

And Cal Henderson:

See Also:

• DjangoCon Speakers Share Success Stories
• GeoDjango Shows Off Mapping Superpowers at DjangoCon
• DjangoCon: Can Django Save Journalism?
• Catch Up With Latest DjangoCon News Online

Where does Django go from here? That’s the question that closed out the final talk here at DjangoCon, with the co-creators of Django, Adrian Holovaty (above left) and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, addressing their own ideas for the future of the framework and as well as some “I want a pony” suggestions from the audience.

But before they delved into the nuts and bolts of what we can look forward to, both Kaplan-Moss and Holovaty went to great lengths to stress that Django is still not, at least in their minds, a framework, but rather “a way to get shit done.”

Although it could be taken as quip, after two full days of DjangoCon there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear — the core Django developers are extremely informal and very willing to listen too feedback and criticism. In fact Kaplan-Moss repeatedly stressed the importance of the community remaining open to criticism and admitting mistakes as well as fixing them.

So what can you expect in future version of Django? Kaplan-Moss and Holovaty had a number of suggestions for improving the Django admin — multiple delete, multiple edits and more — as well as support for multiple databases, an updated official Django book and more.

Perhaps the most welcome news (judging by audience response) is that Django will, baring serious community objections, move to a timed release schedule.

Other ideas included bringing the Django community sites together; perhaps using OpenID to handle identity, but also perhaps simply bringing together some of the many community sites — Django Snippets, Django People, Django Plugables, etc — so the sites could share data between themselves.

After outlining their own ideas, the pair turned suggestions over to the crowd, which asked for everything from multiple database support (a running theme at the conference) to ORM improvements, as well as dozens of smaller requests.

[Update: Simon Willison has collected up most of the suggestions and entered them in the Django ticket tracker with the keyword DjangoCon; head over to see a complete list of what the people want.]

The only suggestion that was universally booed was rolling Ajax support into Django. As Holovaty suggested, “that’s what JQuery.com is for.”

And that brings the first ever DjangoCon to a close. But be sure to stop by Webmonkey for all the latest Django news as well as some more tutorials.

See Also:

• DjangoCon Speakers Share Success Stories
• GeoDjango Shows Off Mapping Superpowers at DjangoCon
• DjangoCon: Can Django Save Journalism?
• Catch Up With Latest DjangoCon News Online

Andy McCurdy of Whiskey Media, Michael Greer from The Onion and Leah Culver of Pownce talk about the successes their websites have found with Django.

The real test of any web application framework doesn’t involve abstracts like benchmark scores, but rather how well it performs in the wild. Maybe even more important is the big question: is anyone using it to build serious websites?

In the case of Django, the answer is yes. There are already several very large sites running on the framework, proving that, multiple database issues aside, Django can scale. It works for everyone from Google and the Free Software Foundation to The Onion, which is using Django to power its new Decider website.

Sunday afternoon at DjangoCon, attendees got a behind-the-scenes peek at some successful Django sites and the people who run them. In addition to those in the photo above, panelists also included Jason Yan from Disqus, Joshua “jag” Ginsberg from the Free Software Foundation and Matt Croydon of the Lawrence Journal-World.

But the panel guests didn’t limit the discussion to just their sites and what Django does for them. Moderator Jacob Kaplan Moss also asked each developer to offer some background on how and why they came to use Django.

The common theme on the panel? An overwhelming desire to stop using PHP and embrace Python for web development. Given that Django is the current standout option when it comes to using Python on the web, all the panelists eventually found themselves downloading the Django code. And the rest of course is, well, live sites.

See Also:

• GeoDjango Shows Off Mapping Superpowers at DjangoCon
• DjangoCon: Can Django Save Journalism?
• Catch Up With Latest DjangoCon News Online

We’re deep into the second day of DjangoCon, the two day event dedicated to the open-source web framework. There are some over-arching themes we’re seeing here, mostly involving a lot of self-criticism among Django’s core developers and a lot of discussion about how the framework can be improved and extended so it can better compete with more mature offerings like Rails. Also, you can sense the enthusiasm — everyone’s sporting Django shirts and buttons, chattering away about Django, GeoDjango, Python, and some cool new Django-powered site they heard about at last night’s party.

The hosts here at Google will be posting videos of all the talks soon (we’ll put up a link as soon as one’s available). Attendees are posting photos to Flickr, as are the Webmonkeys. You can also check out the latest tweets using this Twitter widget we whipped up:

Ben Welsh of the LA Times, Matt Waite, creator of PolitiFact, Maura Chace of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Matt Croydon of the Lawrence Journal-World talk about the various ways Django is changing journalism.

Day two of DjangoCon brought together a number of journalists working with Django to talk about how the framework is helping change the way we get our news.

It’s no secret your local newspaper is in big trouble — even major publications are hemorrhaging money and readers. Hounded by aggregation sites like Reddit and Digg on one side and hampered by conservative management unwilling to take risks on the other, the newspaper world is in real trouble. But the good news is that some new organizations are starting to turn to Django to help them do more innovative things online.

Django began life at the Lawrence Journal-World, a progressive online newspaper site, and the journalism background makes itself felt throughout the project. And then there’s Ellington, a Django-powered commercial content management system aimed specifically at newsrooms.

While Django can make a nice CMS for journalists, its real power lies in the potential to completely transform the way news and realtime data is presented online. From the groundbreaking app ChicagoCrime.org to the more recent EveryBlock, Django is helping newspapers discover that, often, the database itself is the news.

The two common themes that quickly emerged from today’s panel were the vast amounts of time newspapers can save with Django — like hurricane evacuation shelter tracker that Waite was able to build in a scant 4 hours — and the ability to flexibly handle and display large chunks of data in organized ways.

Part of the appeal for the newsroom stems from Django’s admin tools which allow developers to almost instantly give reporters a place to post their stories, even before the views, URLs and user interface have been created.

As moderator Adrian Holovaty pointed out, journalists are “some of stupidest people when it comes to using computers,” and the Django admin system makes it relatively simple to manage and update a site.

Of course Django isn’t a panacea — often times the real and more pressing problem is that so much news data is in truly useless, inflexible formats.

But even in the case of awkward source data, Django has helped some journalists change the way they look at their stories — Politifact’s Matt Waite, for instance, said that Django encouraged him to learn programming, which is a familiar refrain here at DjangoCon.

As LJWorld‘s Matt Croydon pointed out, there’s a good bit of crossover happening because of Django — journalists turn to programming because of Django and programmers increasingly find themselves working for newspapers interested in pushing the future of online news. Django has become a kind of bridge between the two once disconnected groups.

Naturally, not everything is rosy. Like nearly everyone at DjangoCon, journalists have their gripes about Django. The main complaint from the journalist panel was the lack of good database migration tools — changing a Django model when the database is already storing a good bit of data is not easy (though Simon Willison’s dmigrations tool promises to make that task much easier)

While Django alone isn’t enough too save the floundering world of online news, it is at least offering journalists and their editors some innovative ways to present data, stories and mashups in new and creative ways.

• EveryBlock Launches Hyper-local News Service for Big Cities

Cal Henderson, Flickr’s Engineering Manager, closed out the first day of DjangoCon with a very funny talk entitled Why I Hate Django. Despite the fact that he claims to be working on “yet another fucking blogging engine” built with Django, Henderson professed, tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he hates Django.

Of course, mind you, Henderson doesn’t hate Django nearly as much as he hates smug Rails developers, but nevertheless, he has some issues with Django:

• Django team does not have beards = not serious
• Django team = boy band
• Verbose template syntax makes people cry (Henderson demonstrated how using the Smarty template system can save you three keystrokes)
• Low version numbers are suspicious (Django is only at 1.0)
• Django can’t pluralize octopus
• No mascot

Perhaps the funniest criticism was that, unlike Python, a serious programming language would not have a cheese shop where you get eggs.

Henderson did hit on one mildly serious point — that frameworks speed your development time at first, but then you often hit a wall. The framework doesn’t do what you want and you have to dig into its internals to figure out how to do what you want, which is often more difficult than writing your own framework from the ground up.

He also addressed some real shortcomings of Django, like its inability to read and write from multiple database servers (which, incidentally, is something the developers are aware of and will be added in a future version).

Of course, while Henderson’s presentation had some valid points that the Django community is well aware of, it was all in good fun and made for a lighthearted end to the first day of DjangoCon.

Cal’s slides from his talk will be available (soon, he promises) on his site at iamcal.com/talks.

See Also:

• DjangoCon: The Long Winding Road to Django 1.0
• DjangoCon: Google’s Guido van Rossum On App Engine’s Future
• Django Deemed Perfect, Goes 1.0

Adrian Holovaty took the stage at DjangoCon shortly after lunch to walk Django users down memory lane, showing the unlikely evolution of a very simplistic tool he and Jacob Kaplan-Moss hacked together in a hurry, to the mature open source framework that is today’s Django.

Suffice to say that Django comes from humble beginnings. Holovaty walked through a series of humorous, self-deprecating slides showing the many mistakes he and the other earlier developers made in Django’s earlier stage.

He also highlighted the many times he assured the community that some feature would be “the last major change before 1.0.” As seasoned Django users know, the 1.0 release was a long time coming and Holovaty freely acknowledged that his early promises often went unfulfilled.

After tracing the evolution of Django to the semi-stable state it reached earlier this year, Jacob Kaplan-Moss offered an overview of the significant changes that have happened in the last several months leading up to the 1.0 release.

Perhaps the most exciting news for Django newcomers is 1.0′s much improved and expanded documentation. Not only have the Django docs been updated to reflect the new features (with some 40,000 new lines of documentation), but there are some new documentation tools like the ability to build the docs locally or even generate very nice PDF versions for offline reading.

As proof of Django’s open source approach and the vibrant community surrounding it, Moss reports that about half of the source code contributions are now coming from the community. The Django author’s page currently lists some 230 authors.

See Also:

• Django Deemed Perfect, Goes 1.0
• First Django Beta Paves the Way for 1.0
• Django Developers Announce First Ever Conference
• Django Poised to Take Over the Web With New Foundation