Over to the right, in the sidebar, you may notice a nifty javascript calendar displaying the current month with some days highlighted. It is, in fact, a navigation tool for the blog. The highlighted days are the days with posts. Click on a day, see the posts for that day. If there are no posts for that day, it falls back to the month. If there are no posts for that month, it falls back to the year. Pretty simple stuff, really.

The calendar is implemented with YUI, and the fallback mechanism is, of course, all Django code. The fallback isn't something that's built into Django, sadly, but was relatively easy to implement by just wrapping Django's date-based generic views in some views of my own. Really it's just a simple 'try except' block that catched a 404 error and instead returns a redirect. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself:

from django.template import loader
from django.http import Http404, HttpResponseRedirect
from django.views.generic import date_based


def archive_month(request, year, month, queryset, date_field, month_format='%m', template_name=None, template_loader=loader, extra_context=None, allow_empty=False, context_processor=None, template_object_name='object', mimetype=None, allow_future=False):
    try:
        return date_based.archive_month(request, year, month, queryset, date_field, month_format, template_name, template_loader, extra_context, allow_empty, context_processor, template_object_name, mimetype, allow_future)
    except Http404:
        return HttpResponseRedirect("/%s/" % year)

def archive_day(request, year, month, day, queryset, date_field, month_format='%m', day_format='%d', template_name=None, template_loader=loader,extra_context=None, allow_empty=False, context_processor=None, template_object_name='object', mimetype=None, allow_future=False):
    try:
        return date_based.archive_day(request, year, month, day, queryset, date_field, month_format, day_format, template_name, template_loader, extra_context, allow_empty, context_processor, template_object_name, mimetype, allow_future)
    except Http404:
        return HttpResponseRedirect("/%s/%s/" % (year, month))

(Also check out nifty syntax highlighting! Based off this snippet from Django snippets, modified to remove the Markdown bits. And by highlighting, I of course mean formatting. I'll be adding fun colors and such to it in the near future.)

I just submitted my first patch to Django! Among other things, this is my first real forray into the inner depths of the Django code. This patch fixes an issues that had been bothering me for quite some time. In Django's admin interface it's possible to specify that a particular field should be automatically filled in with the value(s) you enter in some other field(s). For example, as I typed 'My first Django patch' into the title field of the form I used to write this post, it was automatically filling in a slug field that's being used for the permalink to this post with 'my-first-django-patch'. This is a very useful features and uses just a little bit of javascript to accomplish it. The only problem is that it only works when you're trying to pull information from a text field. Sometimes, however, you might want to pull information from another sort of field, such as a drop-down menu. Previously Django simply wasn't capable of this. With my changes, however, it is able to handle this potentiality quite well.

It's not really a huge patch, just a fairly a little added code to a single javascript method, and there's no guarantee that my patch will every make it's way into the Django code base, but it's still fun to be able to contribute to one of my favorite open source projects ever. The patch, for those that are curious, can be found here, and I've also submitted it to djangosnippets.org here.