There's quite a bit happening for geeks in Cape Town this month. 

On Saturday 6th from 14:00 to about 16:00, the Cape Town Python User Group will be holding its sixth meeting at the Bandwidth Barn, where you can hear me talking about Pylons and Graeme Glass talking about Python on the S60 mobile/smartphone platform.

On Tuesday 9th from 18:30 onwards, the Western Cape Linux User Group will be holding a meeting at the UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre (as usual), with Jonathan Hitchcock talking about the Gentoo Portage package management system.

On Wednesday 17th, Moodia is hosting the first Facebook Developer Garage Cape Town (Facebook required), at the Waverley business park from 18:30 to 22:30.  This should be an interesting event, and hopefully we'll see some Facebook development talks, tutorials, or projects at *Camp.

On Saturday 20th, the first PodCampCapeTown is happening (although I think I might have to give it a miss, given my schedule) from 9am to 5pm at The Wild Fig (you might remember that they were the venue for the May Cape Town GeekDinner).

On Saturday 27th, slightly less geeky, there's the 27-13 27dinner from 18:30 onwards at the Deer Park Cafe (you might remember that this was where the "1 of 50" open content party was held last month).

Also by CLUG, on Tuesday 30th, UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre from 18:30, Jeremy Thurgood will be talking about the DARCS version control system.

I like that we're discovering some good venues - the Bandwidth Barn, the Wild Fig, and the Deer Park Cafe all seem quite friendly to being used as venues for the kind of events we're organising.

Fearing I'd never actually getting around to making a neutral theme to put into my web log project, Gibe, I've now just bundled the BloggingPro theme by DesignDisease into the base release.

I've also bundled the tags plugin for an improved default experience.

And I've removed the custom Google search keyed to my domain.  You know, in case someone actually would like to use it on _their_ site and not mine...

Next release will have "pages" - just generic pages that aren't web log entries, so I can stop maintaining stuff in HTML manually.

And, hopefully, I'll be able to optionally support postmarkup for the editing of posts and pages.  Especially pages - custom postmarkup tags being defined in plugins would be very cool!

And then begins the descent into madness that is creating a from-scratch CMS system for Pylons (maybe using a TurboGears 2 template for Pylons), using the lessons learned from Gibe.  It is going to be called Mazarine (after the Mazarine Blue butterfly).

After converting 70+% of a project at work from Django to TurboGears over a week and a bit, and starting at rewriting an existing TurboGears project of mine to Pylons, quite a few things have interested me about the exercises.

Standard disclaimer about this just being my personal feelings and not some scientific test applies.  I've used TurboGears (90% own projects) a lot longer than I've used Django and Pylons, and I've used Django (50% work projects) a little bit more than I've used Pylons (only own projects so far).  I also prefer tea to coffee, tcsh to bash, and winter to summer.

... 

I've been spending a lot of time looking at Pylons lately.  Over the past few months, I've noticed an increase of interest in it, and an increase in activity around it.  Not least of this activity is in the creation of documentation on the Pylons-related spaces on the Python Web Documentation Project.

While there are still many little niggles about Pylons (like, for example, deciding on the correct way to set up your database connectivity), it's great that that so much of it is being documented - there's recipes for setting up SQLAlchemy with Pylons, and doing unit tests with SQLAlchemy and Pylons, and also a quick whistle-stop tour of SQLAlchemy for people arriving at Pylons before encountering SQLAlchemy.

The Pylons Cookbook is starting to look really impressive - with lots of deployment information, as well as background informational and conceptual information, recipes for common tasks, and so forth.  And there's even some discussion of some of the more advanced and of not-particularly-framework-specific stuff - like on how one can create your own template for paster create, or use entry points to create and handle plugins.

Anyway, not part of the documentation project (yet), Mike Orr's Pylons Execution Analysis of a Pylons application.  From deployment (installating the packages, using paster make-config and paster setup-app) through Paste Script, Paste Deploy, and into the Pylons framework and your own application, it is an invaluable introduction to what happens when.