Re: An alternate cry for help

Hi Christos,

I cannot comment directly on Pinax as I have never used it before, however I can give some general comments.

Asking how to make a social network is the same as asking how to make a game, how to build a car, how to write a book etc.. it *completely* depends on what your end goal is, and how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

If your end goal is to better your development skills in Python, then you could start out with something like this;

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

If this is not your end goal, then you will have certain limitation. For example, I could use (CMS FRAMEWORK HERE) to make a very basic blog with zero programming skill, but extending the functionality would require either a pre-existing plugin, or time being spent on learning the framework and language.. I could possibly throw together a very quick hack, or spend X amount of time learning every little bit about what I'm doing.

An excellent place to start looking would be on github, there are plenty of projects you could use for inspiration/examples to get you started.

Hope this helps

Cal

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Christos Jonathan Hayward <christos.jonathan.hayward@gmail.com> wrote:

I wrote earlier asking if someone could correct my ignorance to go from Pinax building blocks to a working site. Since then, I searched Safari, and found five references to Pinax, at http://my.safaribooksonline.com/search?q=Pinax . One is a tangent in a Django book I wrote; three are Python books I didn't write; and one is an iPhone JavaScript book that includes 'pinax' in a Greek-English lexicon's URL.

I realized after posting the original post below that although I'm an avid learner my ignorance of Pinax may be a bit of a challenge to straighten out. So besides the possibility of educating me to really know how to put Pinax sites together, could someone preassemble a complete social site that just needs database setup, a syncdb, and a gunicorn invocation? It would be nice to have the earlier Pinax Social Project reimplemented using the new tools, as opposed to the pinax-social-project which is a set of building blocks to complete a social project. It seems the general approach is to turn over better and better building blocks to the user, but the already-working sensible default has its merits, and I'd appreciate those merits after a day of struggling with old Pinax, new Pinax, borrowed Pinax, blue Pinax, not getting any responses with good learning resources, and searching Safari and recognizing that O'Reilly's whole Safari does not contain as much information about Pinax as the email you are reading, not enough by half, and that kind of makes my ignorance a less changeable condition. If I'm ignorant about Django but have the Django documentation and the Django book, I can reduce my ignorance. Here I don't see how I can reduce my ignorance, and my thoughts turn to an evaluation that working Pinax is excellent, not-configured Pinax that you don't know how to improve is worth very little, and Liferat is mediocre but works, in its own special way.

After a day or so of losing at trying to make pinax-social-network 1.0 have the merits of Pinax social-project 0.5 or .7, I'd like to ask how to cut with the grain instead of against it.

The earlier version came as a fully functional site: you could override and customize if you want, but it came "batteries included", as a room with well-chosen pegs on the walls, pictures hanging on the hooks, and furniture as needed. You could replace as much of the room's initial contents as you wanted, but it came as a furnished room.

Pinax-social-network 1.0 is not a furnished room. It has pegs, and the pegs are about as well-placed as you could ask for, but if you want pictures on those pegs, it's on you to put pictures on the pegs. And there is space you can put furniture in the room; the room is left empty so you can put whatever furniture you want in. And the room comes with elegantly placed lorem ipsum graffiti on the walls, to motivate you to paint or wallpaper the walls to meet your taste. It comes "batteries removed."

So... what are the resources, and how does one go about, making a social network here? Do I just take it as a bit of Django putty? I expect I'd do a lot of reinventing the wheel if I just use Django knowledge. Is there a tutorial that shows how to make a live site out of one of Pinax's projects?

I spent a bit of time reading about Liferat Liferay before remembering how painful it was even when I knew it well. The problem here may just be that I am ignorant about Pinax, and ignorance is a changeable condition.

So let's say I know something about Python, something about Django and something about older, fully assembled versions of Pinax, but not how to take a starter Pinax project and make a finished site out of it. I'm ignorant on that point. How can I cure my ignorance? What resources are out there so I can get what was so easily in reach in older versions of Pinax?

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Christos Jonathan Hayward, an Orthodox Christian author. Amazon • Author Bio • Email • Facebook • Fan Page • Google Plus • LinkedIn • Professional • Twitter • Web • What's New? If you read just one of my books, you'll want The Best of Jonathan's Corner.

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