So herein lies my question.
Django project that was originally developed several years ago when django was still 0.97 version. The code was continuously built on to the point where I think band aids upon bandaids on top of bandaids is not going to cut it.
How can I start with untangling this django project?
Currently the project is in 1.2.7
Python being used is 2.6
The main thing I want to find out is what have been the most common traps that people fell into when developing a django project.
*The unit tests are most definitely one place to catch problems, but I was thinking of something more general. For example several pages take a very long time to load, if anyone had similar problems what were their solutions?
I would personally start with a solid set of UnitTests. Once you have your test suite, you can create a second project based on 1.4 (which is coming out imminently) and run the tests looking for failures.
docs are here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/testing/
Correct the failures or remove the offending code in favor of something that is 1.4 compliant.
From there, you might want to go back and refactor the codebase to reflect the changes that django has made. Specifically, I would go back and look to see what has changed:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/releases/
I would consider removing anything that django has since implemented. Run the tests again.
You might want to take this opportunity to shift to python2.7, if you aren’t already there.