Recap of the First Pinax Hangout

Last Thursday at noon Eastern time, we screencasted our first Pinax Hangout. Here’s a little recap for you.

The purpose of the Pinax Hangouts is to engage more with the Pinax community. We want to let you know what we are working on, answer your questions, and present demos of old and new apps and starter projects. Our three hosts this month were James Tauber, Patrick Altman, and Brian Rosner.

James Tauber first announced our new Pinax Slack channel and our newly launched blog. Our blog was built on pinax-project-blog and serves as a great example for those of you who’d like to build their own blogs with the help of Pinax. The code is completely open source and you can find it here. On our blog you can find Pinax release notes, How Tos, posts about design decisions, the community, and other general information about the Pinax project. Please join our Slack channel and check out more of our blog if you haven’t already done so!

James gave a short introduction about Pinax and explained what Pinax is. Patrick Altman then talked about Pinax starter projects, which are project templates that allow you to build things quickly, and presented a demo of one of our most popular Pinax starter projects, pinax-project-account.

We recently decided on a new approach for our starter projects. We used to have a repository for each starter project, which got hard to maintain, so we created a single repository with branches for each type, which allows us to maintain things better. If you‘d like to read more about our new starter project approach, please check out our Pinax project documentation.

In the end James mentioned some great ways on how you can contribute to the Pinax project. Here are a few ideas:

  • Add new features or make feature requests to apps you’re interested in. Pinax apps are just Django apps.
  • Help us put together more demo starter projects as a community.
  • Present demos of Pinax apps
  • Develop new Pinax apps
  • Motivate the development of new Pinax apps. If you have ideas for sites you’d like to build out of Pinax components or if one component is missing, let us know, we’d love to work with you on building new apps.
  • If you have any ideas for front-end frameworks other than Bootstrap that you’d like Pinax to adopt, please let us know as well.

If you missed our August Pinax Hangout, you can watch the video here

Our plan is to do a Pinax Hangout each month, on the third Thursday of the month, at noon Eastern time. We hope that you will join us for our September Pinax Hangout. Brian Rosner will be our host next month. An official announcement, including an agenda will be made soon.

If you have any questions, which you’d like us to answer during the next Pinax Hangout or if there are any particular apps or starter projects you’d like us to demonstrate, please join our Pinax Slack channel and post all your suggestions in the pinax-hangouts channel. We’d love to hear from you!

The Eldarion team, including a few Pinax core developers, will also be at DjangoCon in Austin next month, so if you are there and would like to chat about Pinax in person, get started with Pinax, or contribute to Pinax during the DjangoCon sprints, please get in touch!