I'm planning on getting a plumbing overhaul completed before the D Conference at the end of August.  The particulars involve using Django to serve everything on the site that isn't an individual project.  This will include the Home, Site, and even Project List pages.

In the past, I've used Trac to do this, and it resulted in some substantial modifications to the Trac codebase.  As they try to move to 0.11 and Genshi, I would like to get as much of this custom code factored out.  I believe it is my mods that expose the regexp bug in Python's _sre.c file, and causes the dsource server to hang every now and then.  So the switch to Django should be fairly positive.

In working with Django again, I remembered what a joy their template language is to use.  It doesn't incur the overhead of an XML parser, it supports template inheritance, and you can't call Python code or have side-effects at all.  These are good things, imho.  In line with this article, and StringTemplate & SGTE.

I also plan on getting rid of phpBB (finally) and moving to Eric Anderton's TracForums plugin in each project.  This means that I'll need a new Authn/Authz subsystem and I think I'm going to use Django's.  In fact, I'll be using Django 'user' model for auth in the dsource.org Trac plugins, and I might as well use dsource's 'projects' model in those plugins as well.  I'm pretty sure it will piss me off when I have to use Genshi instead of Django to do some things in Trac, but whaddayagonnado? 

My target is to get something onto the server by the end of July and then get some enhancements to the Projects List page by the conference.  We'll see how much the newborn lets me get accomplished ;)

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