History

From Origins To DjangoCon 2008

The idea for Pinax was seeded in 2007 when James Tauber was developing a number of websites (including Quisition and Habitualist) using Django and realized how much of the code he was writing or intending to write was similar across websites.

James became interested in developing a set of reusable Django apps and developing conventions around what such reusable apps should look like. A group called the "Hotclub of France" (or django-hotclub) was formed after PyCon 2007, the name coming from the name of Django Reinhart's band. Not much work (or even discussion) took place the rest of the 2007. There was some discussion and a little bit of sprinting on individual reusable apps at PyCon 2008.

In early May 2008, James suggested to the django-hotclub mailing list the need for a project that could be "an out-of-the-box Django-based website with everything but the domain-specific functionality". James also suggested it could be a useful scaffolding for writing and trying out reusable apps. He started what he initially called "Tabula Rasa", shortly after renamed to "Pinax", a suggestion by Orestis Markou.

On Memorial Day weekend 2008, James decided to spend the weekend hacking on this new Pinax project and was joined by other "hotclub" members Brian Rosner, Jannis Leidel, and Eric Florenzano. By the end of the weekend, with help from others, Pinax had user profile pages, gravatars, user-to-user messages, announcements, OpenID support, join invitations, a basic Twitter clone with OEmbed support, groups and localizations into German, Spanish, and Swedish.

By July, Pinax added wikis, threaded discussions, bookmarks with voting, contact import, blogs with tagging and localization into Brazilian Portuguese and Hebrew.

TODO: THE BREAK OUT OF CLOUD27

TODO: DJANGOCON 2008

TODO: THE 0.7.X ERA

TODO: THE 0.9.X ERA

Some Historical Blog Posts