A Fresh Start

Between 0.9a1 and 0.9a2 the core team essentially made a fresh start on Pinax. Rather than modify things in place, we took an empty repository and added back the good stuff, fixed the okay stuff and left the bad stuff behind.

Multiple Themes

In 0.7 and 0.9a1 we hinted at the possibility of alternative themes for Pinax with a PINAX_THEME settings. We've now gone a completely different way and treat themes just as Django apps with templates and static files. To help demonstrate this, we now provide two themes for Pinax, both of which live externally, both of which are pip installable Django apps. The default theme is now one based on Twitter's excellent Bootstrap toolkit. In many ways, Bootstrap does for front ends what Pinax does for the back end so they work really well together. We've also broken out the old design as a "classic theme" you can still use.

External Starter Projects

You'll notice that Pinax 0.9a2 has only four starter projects in the release itself. That is because we are moving towards starter projects being external, just like apps (and now themes). We're still working on the details but before 0.9b1, expect a number of new starter projects that will be released separate from the Pinax core itself. Our hope is that, by externalizing starter projects, others will be encouraged to contribute their own.

Pinax is An Ecosystem

As highlighted in the DjangoCon 2011 Talk on Pinax, it's clear that Pinax is best thought of not as a single piece of software but as an ecosystem. It's a small core (a microkernel of sorts) with apps, starter projects and themes living externally. To help better understand what's going on in the ecosystem, we've created a set of pages under http://pinaxproject.com/ecosystem/. Our hope is that this will enable people to better follow what's going on across the entire collection of apps, starter projects and themes and also find it easier to contribute.

Why Are We Calling This An Alpha If It's Stable?

On the question of production-readiness, the answer for Pinax has often been "it depends". There are plenty of production sites running Pinax, but not all the apps in all the starter projects in 0.7 were production-ready and some were far from it. With the move to more of an ecosystem approach with external apps, starter projects and themes the core of Pinax itself is more robust. We're calling this release an alpha because it's essentially a trial run for a beta release in a couple of weeks. There are a number of things we want to get done before calling this 0.9b1 but we didn't want to wait any longer as what we have now is so much better and more appropriate to use for development and production than any 0.7.x release.

Bottom line is: forget 0.7.x; you can use Pinax 0.9a2 now! For details see Downloads.