When using GenericRelations with Django to create unique generic foreign keys between objects, it can become tiresome having to navigate the RelatedManager every time you need to retrieve the single instance of the one-to-one relationship. This post shows how creating a quick Mixin can help overcome this inconvenience.

Django's annotate method can be useful for counting particular attributes on every member of a queryset (i.e. count the number of books an author has). Unfortunately you can't use the ORM to do any filtering on those attribute. This would be useful for only considering an attribute if it were above a certain value, or belonged to a certain object (i.e. count the number of books with the tag 'Horror'). This post shows how to make use of the extra method Django provides to create filtered annotations

Fandjango is a great application for getting a Facebook Canvas application up and running. It provides a nice view decorator to ensure a user is authorised with Facebook before allowing them access to that view. This post provides a piece of middleware that makes use of that decorator, allowing you to enforce Facebook authorisation on all views in your application.

When beginning with Django I always found it difficult to decide on basic project layouts. What should go where and why? Having read many of the great articles on the topic already out there this post outlines how I have come to manage the folder structure of most of my new Django projects, making sure everything is tidy and safe

When the generated URLs of your objects depends on a field in your model that could potentially change (for example a slug field that is generated from a title which your editor just changed), you can get yourself into trouble with Google as your old URL will now return a 404. This posts outlines an approach to dynamically create redirects whenever an objects changes an url dependant field.

If you are checking your settings.py into Git, make sure you aren't including any potentially sensitive information such as database passwords, secret keys and so on. A quick and easy way to avoid this is to create a separate sensitive.py file.

Django's select_related QuerySet method is a great way to reduce the query count when joining tables but it should come with small print in the documentation. This post goes over that small print.

At times you need to use both sorl.thumbnail and easy_thumbnails in the same template. Both of these apps define a thumbnail template tag from a thumbnail template module meaning that you will be able to use one or the other but not both. To get around this, you can install a great app called django-smart-load-tag

I'm a big fan of using Virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper) where possible. It allows you to cleanly manage multiple Python environments. I also occasionally use CodeRunner to test, debug and run standalone scripts. It wasn't immediately clear to me how to make CodeRunner run inside one of my virtualenvs so this post gives a quick outline on how to get the two to work nicely together.

I encountered a strange problem when making use of a custom AppHook with django-cms. When I mounted a custom app on a cms page, reversing the urls in the template for that app (using get_absolute_url) was producing incorrect urls.