Coder’s Eye

I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest Django site, Invisible Castle. This is a Play-by-post gaming site for RPG players, which gets over a million hits a year.

This is an absolutely huge update from the previous codebase. Before it was written cgi-style with custom cgi code and Cheetah Templates for page layout. As a learning project, and to make it tons more maintainable, I ported the whole thing to Django.

The biggest challenge was converting all the old data, several million rows. It took almost a full day of running my crazy convert script, which I wrote using SQLAlchemy to pull the old data, and direct Django Object creation to insert the new objects.

The single best advantage of the upgrade is that it no longer acts like a pile of razor wire. I can update, change, or modify any part of the code, run regression tests, and expect it to be just fine. Before it was all too easy to break it in a non-obvious way.

Thanks to Herbert Poul for his Sphene Community Tools Django forum code. It is a nice little codebase to host my new forums.

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