Since a while ago I started a project with friends to develop an Open Source group/project management tool with the best web framework out there - Django!

Today is the day! Rancho 0.1 alpha is out!!!

Rancho goal is to make it easy for any company or group of people to manage its projects and people.
Here are some of Rancho’s feature:

• Clear and simple graphical user interface
• Wikiboards that provide collaborative editors that also keep old versions
• Exportation of wikiboards to several formats like PDF or HTML
• Multi-lingual
• Companies to group people
• Threaded messages
• ToDo lists
• Milestone lists
• Files with support for versions
• Simple users management
• E-mail notifications for actions within the projects
• Statistics of every item in every project
• Powerful permissions system

Go ahead and download Rancho from here or try a running demo here. Both the user name and password are ‘admin’.

In case you like Rancho, give us a hand and help us translating Rancho to your language.

For this or for questions, feedback, etc, please write to us using the contact form here.

Have fun with Rancho!

Sometime ago I heard about Deskography. It is a project developed with our beloved Python web framework Django that lets you upload photos of your work environment and see everyone else’s.

This is indeed a good idea. I always like to know how does my connections’ workplace looks like.

Go ahead and share your desk (don’t cheat by cleaning it up first, chaos is the programmer’s order) !

If you’re a Django guy or are wanting to be, you have to visit This Week In Django (TWID) website.

TWID started out as being a weekly podcast by Michael Trier but evolved to be a complete website full of Django resources to either help you give the first steps or keep you informed.

Go on, download the podcasts and listen to them while driving to your job or jogging.

Will Larson wrote this great article on how to use Django to create those web pages you happily used to do when all you knew was HTML.

Until about an year ago, I was using PHP for these static web pages.
The idea was to have just one base index.php and include files by usage of GET to retrieve the PHP files. It was a basic but helpful automation.

The way Will teach you with Django and a basic Python script is much more useful as it abstracts a bunch of stuff.

Give it a try!

Erik Holscher has a blog filled with Django interesting stuff that can be really useful if you wanna step in the Django world or just keep up to date with Django’s nice add-ons.
He’s also making screencasts presenting some of these feature.

Here’s his latest screencast about Django’s command extensions:

Django Command Extensions from Eric Holscher on Vimeo.