Coffee on the Keyboard

When we decided to move SUMO to a new platform, one of the reasons we chose Django was code sharing and reuse—specifically that SUMO and AMO would be able to share code, meaning both teams would save time and see benefits.

So how is that going? Were we right in our assumption here? The code we’re sharing so far:

MultiDB Router

A Django DB router that supports reading from a pool of slave databases.

Cache Machine

A powerful caching library for Django that, in particular, provides automatic object caching and invalidation through the ORM.

Jingo

An adapter for using Jinja2 templates with Django.

Django-Nose

A test runner for Django using Nose.

Django Debug Cache Panel

Adds a cache panel for Django Debug Toolbar.

Test-Utils

Tools we use testing in the Django/Jinja2/Nose setup.

Bleach

A library for sanitizing and linkifying user HTML, based on html5lib.

Fixture Magic

Django management commands for working with fixture data.

Additionally, we expect both teams will probably use the following, eventually:

DidYouMean

A wrapper for Hunspell, using PyHunspell to provide spelling suggestions for searches.

Django Gearman

Provides an easier interface from Django to the Python Gearman bindings.

AMO’s JS and CSS minification

AMO has already solved the problem of JS and CSS minification with Django and Jinja2.

And it’s not a released library, but SUMO has also been able to directly reuse code from AMO to simplify pagination.

Overall, it seems like we’re doing really well on this! It’s great to see the projects not just sharing code, but packaging and publishing it on Github and PyPI. If any of the above is useful to you, go ahead and try it out! You can open issues with any of the packages on Github, or find us in #webdev in irc.mozilla.org.

Bleach is a whitelist-based HTML sanitizer and auto-linker in Python, built on html5lib, for AMO and SUMO and released under the BSD license.

Bleach has two main functions: sanitizing HTML based on a whitelist of tags and attributes, and turning URLs into links. It uses html5lib for both.

For more information on using Bleach, see the README included in the source. For more info on how Bleach works, follow below the jump. Continue reading

When I joined the SUMO team six months ago, the team was just starting a discussion of “where do we go from here?”  SUMO was built on a CMS called TikiWiki, and had diverged pretty significantly in two years. (David Tenser wrote a more detailed history if you’re interested.)

After a few months of talking and testing—and a few changes of direction—we’ve decided that SUMO will follow our colleagues on AMO and move to a custom web application, built on Django, a development framework in Python.

Why are we committing to such a dramatic new direction? Three major reasons. Continue reading

I’m not ashamed of it: I like Windows. I think the user experience is light-years ahead of Gnome and KDE. There’s nothing ostensibly wrong with OS X, but there are little usability differences and frankly switching isn’t worth the annoyance to me. That’s why I run Windows 7 on all three computers I use daily.

This is only a problem when I try to work on LAMP web applications. Sure, I could install XAMPP, but running Apache/PHP on Windows is really not close enough to a production environment. So I have two choices: I can dual-boot Linux and work in an OS—well, a window manager—I don’t like, or I can turn to virtual machines. Continue reading

A common theme we heard in responses to our web developer survey was: “I wish I could help Mozilla, but I’m just a web developer.”

Well, fellow web ninjas, you can put your skills to work with Mozilla and help make the web a better place. Our web projects are open, just like Firefox, and we’d love your help!

If you’re a web developer and want to help Mozilla and Firefox users while working on sites that see millions of visitors every day, follow me through the jump and I’ll show you around our shop and introduce you to the tools we use. Continue reading

At Mozilla, our web development projects are open source, publicly available, and interested in community contributions.

This is one of those things that makes absolute sense when you hear it, but you may have never heard, or thought, of it before.

It’s not terribly well-publicized—that’s something Mike Morgan and I are going to start working on this week—but there are ways you can get involved:

• There’s info about most, if not all, our current projects on the Mozilla Wiki.
• An advanced search in Bugzilla can tell you a lot about what’s going on.
• You can find web dev people on IRC in #webdev, #sumodev, and a few others. (I’m jsocol on irc.mozilla.org.)

Why would you want to contribute to Mozilla web development projects?

• You care about the web, and making it better.
• Our websites are used by millions of people.
• Because of that, we work at scales most developers don’t usually get to see.

Hopefully I’ll have something to add by the end of the week, but in the meantime, come on over and say “hi” on IRC!