Pinax 0.7.3 Made Available Once Again

You want 0.9.x

This page is being kept available for historical reasons, however if you want a Pinax social project, you probably want Stackato's github of pinax-social-project.

I had a long and tiring quest first to get the Pinax 1.0.0 social project to do anything interesting, and then get a nicely working Pinax 0.7.3 project to work with more recent versions of Pinax; a number of features were deprecated and were in fact gone, and I spent several days making what was an ersatz port of a Pinax 0.7.3 social project and its virtual environment to more current (0.9.x) versions of Pinax. I tried to find Pinax 0.7.3 at length on the web, and while I found dozens of websites advertising a free download, none of them had their own copy; they only pointed to the URL on the official site. As I said after giving up several approaches as losing, "zero to sixty in one week and counting." Then I found an old backup with the full contents of Pinax 0.7.3, which means, English translation, "cut like a hot knife through butter in setting up a Pinax project." After gunicorn was installed, my chief efforts were on the front end.Older is sometimes better, and this is a resource I wanted to make publicly available so that others can enjoy the fruit of my labors without suffering what I suffered.

This Pinax project does not represent my own creation in any way. This webpage is intended to provide something useful that is well nigh impossible to track down on the web.

This page assumes that you know what Django, "the Web Framework for Perfectionists with Deadlines," and Pinax are, and that you know basically how to use them. If you want to read documentation on these projects, that's fine; the Django tutorial is here, the Django book is here, and Pinax documentation is here. For mailing list support, there is the django-users mailing list and the pinax-users mailing list.

This older version of Pinax, Pinax 0.7.3, is made available for the simple reason that I wanted to make a social network, and the 1.0.0 hot snazzy new pinax-social project is a stub with only one real page, with "lorem ipsum" instead of real content. In other words, Pinax 0.7.3 provides a real social network, while Pinax 1.0.0 presents a stub as a social network. Patrick Oltman said in response to a "How can I build tribes social network-style under 1.0.0," "We have made Pinax much more modular. Pinax itself is more of an ecosystem of reusable apps, starter projects, and themes. We should probably build a proper social starter project but am curious as to what specific features you'd be interested in having in it." I answered, "Well, the same or better for the 0.7 starter project would be fantastic."

Wherever things stand, Pinax 0.7.x provided a real, fully working social network as a starter project, and as best I can tell, Pinax 1.0.0 says, "Here are a bunch of Lego blocks; you can build whatever you want." But for now at least, they have discontinued the pre-built, fully functioning social network. We may be free to build a social network from the modular building blocks: but a prebuilt social project appears to be off the agenda.

You can download the 0.7.3 bundle from http://CJSHayward.com/wp-content/sourcecode/Pinax-0.7.3-bundle.tar.gz.

From there, you can:

easy_install pip, if pip is not installed.
pip install virtualenv.
virtualenv ~/social-environment.
source ~/social-environment/bin/activate.
pinax-admin clone_project social_project my_social_project, (or download a branded and themed social project from http://CJSHayward.com/pinax/clay.tar.gz.
pip install gnunicorn.
Change directory to my_social_project or whatever you named your project.
Put 'gunicorn,' under INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py
run a python manage.py syncdb (if you used the existing project, deleting clay/dev.db first so you can set the administrative user first), and finally:
run python manage.py run_gunicorn 0.0.0.0:8000 to run the server.

I am not positive of these instructions; they are as I best remember as posted from a machine that won't play nice with Pinax. However, they do outline to a Django/Pinax user what needs to be done. If you notice a flaw in these instructions, please contact me immediately.

You want 0.9.x

Download Pinax-0.7.3-bundle.tar.gz.