I think this series of articles is starting to pay off… A few people are using my first article to learn how to set up a new Pinax website. And also, I am getting feedback on how to do things better.

On the pinax-users list, Bob Haugen pointed out that I was not following the recommended setup, because I was creating my new website inside Pinax’s project directory. There was no real harm, but he was right. I updated my instructions so Pinax and the custom website are in separate directories.

As I wrote on the user list:

Let me explain my motives. I use Subversion daily and I’m comfortable

with it. I knew that just copying the directory would give me lots of

trouble when I decided to update Pinax. So the “export” idea was

natural. I just exported it alongside the sample project because I was just

starting to learn Pinax and didn’t want to mess too much with the

structure because I didn’t know about its dependencies. I had read the

customization doc, but it was not so clear to me at first sight. But the official doc is right. I think we should consider Pinax more

like a library, like Django itself, that should be installed and

updated on its own, and the website we build should be a separate

project, with its own version control. So it should be natural to put

Pinax where we store random software (I used ~/opt) and our website

where we put things we’re working on or software we deploy (I used

~/Projects).

I’m very grateful for the feedback and I hope this humble series may be helpful.

Cheers!