After I initially released Django Frontend Static and Django Frontend Template, I didn’t like how they competed against each other instead of working together. At the time I thought namespacing them along with Django Frontend Skeleton to be same was a good idea…it wasn’t.
While the idea of a similar namespace was good in theory, it fell short in practice – and really probably shouldn’t have been done across several packages. (Thanks to my coworkers for pointing that out.) They all work well together, until you update one and not the rest. In that case you’ll end up missing something, and unfortunately that might be the base template. You can get around this problem by force upgrading during install --upgrade but that’s a work around, not a solution.
And the solution is…
Yes, yet another open source package with a nearly identical name. It’s basically (and by basically I mean that’s actually what it is) Django Frontend Template and Django Frontend Static combined into one package.
Including
Django Frontend includes:
- famfamfam’s Silk icons
- Google Analytics
- HTML5 Boilerplate’s CSS
- iOS-Orientationchange-Fix
- jQuery
- jQuery UI
- jQuery DataTables (CSS and JavaScript)
- jQuery Dynamic Formset
- jQuery Smooth Scroll
- Modernizr
- Normalize
- Twitter Bootstrap (CSS and JavaScript)
- a Django template built on HTML5 Bootstrap
The initial release (0.1.0) was just a combination of the original two packages, the next release will include updated static files including Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.0 RC1. If TWBS releases more release candidates then I’ll update the package as a bug fix (0.2.1, etc.)
Sunsetting
Since Django Frontend contains the same functionality of both Django Frontend Template and Django Frontend Static, those two projects will be discontinued after a couple more releases. If you’re using them now, I suggest switching to Django Frontend soon. If you do continue to use these two while they are being updated, be sure to force upgrade!
While Django Frontend contains all the functionality of Django Frontend Skeleton, skeleton is more focused on using HTML5 Boilerplate and Twitter Bootstrap together, so it will continue on its own for now.
I’m also considering dropping the Google Analytics pieces as they continue to get more complicated, and could be better served by a more focused package like django-analytical.