What are the best benefits of using Pinax?

Question

I recently discovered Pinax that appear to be an django stack with added most-used apps so easy and speed up development.

I never used or heard of Pinax before and like to know if you have feedback about it. I love Django and would like to understand what are to parts of web dev Pinax helps with and using what tools.

Balneology

me too, but will definetly save some development time. – Druse

Answer 1

Pinax is a collection of Django-Apps that have already been glued together for you with some code and sample templates.

It's not plug&play, because Django is not a CMS and Apps are not plugins, but you can get your site going really fast. You just have to remove the stuff you don't need, add other Django Apps that you'd like to use from around the web and write the stuff that nobody has written before and that makes your site special.

I worked on a site with Pinax and had to remove quite a lot, to make it more simple, but it was still totally worth it.

It's a great example (probably the best) of how Django Apps are reusable and how to make them work together best.

Concrete example, here you go: Pinax comes with all the "User" Part of an online community: login, registration, OpenID, E-Mail-Confirmation. That's an example of what you don't have to write.

Confuse

Some concrete examples would be great. – Balneology

That's why I personally favor the basic project. The complete project is just too much of a hassle to remove everything though it makes a great example implementation for any apps you may be thinking of using – Jehu

Answer 2

I'm about to start using Pinax, and I'm glad I discovered it.

Our todo list for the site has a lot of things on it, such as new user sign-up with email verification, discussions, and a news feed for users that blends site-wide updates and updates for that user. We can code all of this up, but it'll take a while. It'd daunting.

Luckily, I discovered Pinax. Instead of coding all those features I'll only need to learn the Pinax structure and write some glue. I bet it will take 1/50th of the time that would have been required to write the features we need.

Reconnoitre

That's the kind of anwser I am interested in. If somebody has an actual field experience with Pinax, I even more going for it. – Balneology

Answer 3

As the two other posts said, it comes with a lot of pre-packaged apps that take care of common tasks in modern websites. Here's a list of the external apps that come packaged: https://github.com/pinax/pinax/blob/master/requirements/pinax.txt

It also gives you project templates to start from, which you can see here: https://github.com/pinax/pinax/tree/master/pinax/projects/

The projects have working default settings in place so that you can run syncdb then runserver to get going immediately, unlike default Django. Its design also encourages you to write your own apps in such a way that they are more reusable. As they put it, "By integrating numerous reusable Django apps to take care of the things that many sites have in common, it lets you focus on what makes your site different."

It does have a small learning curve of its own but I've personally been very happy with it and learned a lot more about Django (and git and virtualenv) by using Pinax.

Chela

I love git and virtualenv, but why do you learn more about it using Pinax. And how does Pinax enforce reusability for your apps ? – Balneology

They use git for the main Pinax project as well as the supporting apps and practically require you to use virtualenv (for good reason) to get get Pinax running. The app dependencies are always changing and being updated so it would get messy very quickly if they did otherwise. Also it doesn't force you to create reusable apps but certainly encourages it by proving good examples and making it easier to write loosely-coupled apps than not to (when interacting with Pinax's apps). – Chela

Seems the first link is broken – Romanaromanas