Hacker News Reader

Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

For those who works with designers or html people who don't use the command line, how do you collaborate with them with Django?

For me it's a perpetual issue to get them up and running, commit/push with git, etc etc. Is there an easier solution? Basically, I'd like them to get started and be able to tweak the templates and css as effortless as possible.

It's kind of very hard to have people working directly in templates/css and others updating html/css and them diff the changes, integrate them, etc..

View on HN

A few suggestions:

- Use Vagrant and some bootstrap scripts (or Docker) to make giving them a dev environment easy

- Get them to use a git GUI like SourceTree (free & good: http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/)

- Build a workflow around pull requests / review branches a la github/bitbucket/gerrit so you can have them submit changes but an engineer reviews/verifies before it's merged.

In general, empowering them to do this is an investment in the future and well worth it.

I don't use django, but one of the easiest ways to get designers and non technical folks working directly on projects is to run virtual machines with vagrant[0] and automate everything as much as possible.

[0] http://vagrantup.com/

As someone with no experience with this, any resources you'd recommend on how to set this up?

http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com/

Doing the first 2 lessons will not only get your a vagrant powered VM up and running, it will also give you a good feel for normal use. And you'll also be learning Django.

well, it's mainly geared towards PHP but you might find https://puphpet.com/ useful to get a reasonably sane vagrant/puppet installation which you can then customize for django or whatever. You could just remove the php specific stuff from the generated configurations if you don't want it

There are several GUIs for version control software out there, Tortoise deserves a mention, but there are others if you don't like it.

For Django, all you need is a portable Python installation, and a start script for starting the development server, isn't it?

PyCharm (a Python IDE from JetBrains) is excellent, designers from my team love it.

Tell them to learn or get a new job. This is basic literacy in our industry.

I also have this same problem. It's one of the things which has made me think about switching to web2py - you can edit templates and css, and do commits directly in the admin. There is something a bit crazy about it though. Alternatively I don't think it would be that difficult to put a decent JavaScript-based editor on a page and allow editing of certain files, combined with a way of running the collectstatic management command. Difficult enough for me to not have tried it though.

What command line stuff would they need to do? I've built a couple reasonably complex projects using Django, and I don't remember spending much time at all on the command line.

I think I had a one line batch file to start the server, but that's it. Subversion integrates directly into the filesystem with tortoisesvn and even Git has good tools these days.

I can't imagine a designer needing to touch the command line at all.

Working with frontend designers/developers in a few different languages (PHP/Python), the easiest way for our office was to just use a central development server in the office then use NFS.

Sourcetree is a little slow for them (they use Macs), but they seem to get the idea.

We put together a vagrant script and a set of instructions specifically for front-end devs on Windows who might lack the bash-fu and Python skills needed to get a local setup.

Happy to share if you ping me.

Let them code things up as static HTML then add in your dynamic stuff after.

It's good for the first time, but as you move forward it becomes really annoying to check the diffs and merge them back..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com