Development Updates

It’s been a while since I updated everyone on the status of the DJ Edna project source. I’ve been working on significantly streamlining the installation process and performing a refactoring that will make it easier to incorporate DJ Edna functionality into existing Django sites. I’ve also been working on adding Satchmo integration to provide e-commerce functionality for digital products and physical merchandise. One of the great things about the Satchmo Project is that it comes out of the box with rich support for selling physical items (e.g. t-shirts) including shipping and tax calculations, invoices, shipping labels, product variations (e.g t-shirt sizes/colors), multiple payment processors, gift certificates, and discount codes. I only had to add support for purchasing DJ Edna digital access permits (i.e. the access you currently get when you redeem a code) which, after a couple of weeks of digging through the Satchmo source code, was easier than I thought it would be.

But e-commerce integration isn’t complete yet. While modifying the default Satchmo templates to allow for “Permit Products,” it became clear that the existing DJ Edna views and templates were getting a little long in the tooth. So, like any over-ambitious software architect, I’ve begun a brand new set of views and templates that will correct many of the deficiencies and properly separate the core functionality of the DJ Edna catalog system from presentation-level functionality. This should make creating custom DJ Edna installs even easier.

Finally, when this work is complete, I’ll begin a refactoring of the core catalog models paying special attention to breaking out expensive operations (i.e. scanning a catalog for new tracks) into non-web processes connected to the webapp via a persistent work queue. This should pave the way for a simplified track upload process.

Once all that work is complete, I’ll be tempted to tag a 1.0 release and move on to some more exciting functionality focused around creating and keeping True Fans. More on that in a future post as the current refactoring projects come to a close.