Question

I’ve just came around dbjlets which was released in 2008. It adds many useful functions, but it’s also a big lumb of code.

Does it still make sense to use djblets in 2010, or have better alternatives emerged? I also suspect some features have been merged into Django.

I’m particulary interested in:

• auth – I guess django-registration addresses this?
• datagrid
• rooturl – allow easy deployment in a subfolder
• decorators – easier writing of blocktags, etc..
• JSONField – store random data.
• siteconfig – overlay settings.py with database settings

Answer 1

Since Djblets is still actively developed, I think it still has purpose:)

Link to the current repository: http://github.com/djblets/djblets

• auth: django-registration might be better for this, it depends on your needs, I suppose.
• datagrid: I don’t know a single other decent datagrid app for Django, it doesn’t mean there are none. But I don’t know them 😉
• rooturl: I am not sure if that’s really that useful. I don’t see much advantage in that compared to the normal URL system.
• decorators: writing tags in Django is still a lot of work, but this makes it quite easy. Definitely worth it. Although Django has quite a few similar shortcuts these days.
• JSONField: it can definitely be handy, but a lot of the times it’s the wrong solution 😉
• siteconfig: I believe that there are several projects that focus on this specifically, just find one that you like (or think of your own structure, which is what I did).

All in all it comes down to, do you find the extensions useful. Personally I think that the datagrid and the decorators are the most useful parts.

But instead of using decorators to make writing tags easier you could also try Jinja2 as a template parser which allows multiple and named arguments for filters. Or simply calling functions directly. That way you rarely need template tags.