My Django

I’m excited to announce the launch of progopedia.com — free encyclopedia of programming languages.

The site is still in alpha, lacks descriptions of many popular languages, site engine definitely needs more work but I think it’s a good starting point.

Site uses Django (of course), Markdown (with http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Markdown/) as markup language, Pygments for syntax highlighting, django-reversion for version control, DISQUS and django-disqus for comments.

Any feedback is highly appreciated. And if you want to join progopedia.com as an editor — do it :-)

Just quick note for myself and for people still using mod_python.

To use virtualenv with mod_python create file myvirtualdjango.py in your virtualenv bin directory (change the path to reflect your setup):

#myvirtualdjango.py

activate_this = '/home/django/progopedia.ru/ve/bin/activate_this.py'
execfile(activate_this, dict(__file__=activate_this))

from django.core.handlers.modpython import handler

In the apache conf file add your virtualenv bin directory to the PythonPath and set PythonHandler to myvirtualdjango (copy-and-paste from real server httpd.conf):

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:81>
    ServerName progopedia.ru
    ServerAdmin admin@progopedia.ru

    <Location "/">
        SetHandler python-program
        PythonPath "['/home/django/progopedia.ru/ve/bin', '/home/django/progopedia.ru/src/progopedia_ru_project/'] + sys.path"
        PythonHandler myvirtualdjango
        SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE settings
        SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/tmp/egg
        PythonInterpreter polyprog_ru
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

I used shared hosting for my Django-based Encyclopedia of Programming Languages (Russian version), but realized, that I need dedicated server for more performance and stability. For now, I chose cheap server with 1,8 GHz CPU and 512 Mb RAM, with CentOS 5 installed.

In this article I’ll share my experience for installing on this server Django with Apache mod_python, with memcached caching and lighttpd for serving static files.