Yet another Django Site - CnbcEb.com

That’s right, we launched a new website yesterday - CNBC European Business, completely written in Django using MySQL.

We did some cool things with this site, particularly:

OpenCalais Integration (yes, again) - powers our recommendation system
Some very nice MooTools effects
A polling function using Google Charts API
The Django Comments system
Adobe InDesign XML-to-site import (batch)

What I think is important about this site was that its development flowed almost entirely from the design - I know many sites roll through this method, but in our case we didn’t even start building the back office until we had a solid design - the designs dictated the functionality and the development flowed from there, it was a great way to do things as design elements suddenly became functional from mere mockups.

This was only possible because we already had a flexible codebase to build from and the site was relatively simple feature-wise (not to mention porops to the django templating system).

Here’s the kicker: total development time for this project was two weeks…

The other really cool feature is the XML import from Adobe InDesign - this change has allowed us to ensure quality and consistency by taking site copy directly out of the source documents (in batch, no less) so a full site update takes about 1 second given the XML files.

We’ve got some bigger stuff comming up, will keep you posted