The Pinax Project, a premiere up and coming platform for rapidly developing Django sites, now lives on GitHub at https://github.com/pinax/pinax.

Cloud27 is an example of what can be done with Pinax.

The features overview is very impressive:

• openid support
• email verification
• password management
• site announcements
• a notification framework
• user-to-user messaging
• friend invitation (both internal and external to the site)
• a basic twitter clone
• oembed support
• gravatar support
• interest groups (called tribes)
• projects with basic task and issue management
• threaded discussions
• wikis with multiple markup support
• blogging
• bookmarks
• tagging
• contact import (from vCard, Google or Yahoo)
• photo management

Having personally coded almost half of those features for GitHub (and other sites in the past), I’d say this is a huge potential time saver worth a look.

First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it…

Yes, git branch doesn’t take a -b flag. Sidewalk and chalk doesn’t edit easily.

Featured Project

synapse Oh, you thought Pidgin was the only (cool) Linux IM client. Enter synapse, your brand spankin’ new XMPP messenger built with Mono. It already boasts quite a few awesome features, from previewing images, following your friends’ tweets, and even syntax highlighting for code blocks. Check out the project’s site for more features or to download it, and fork away if you’re on Ubuntu and need something fun to hack on.

Notably New Projects

donk-remix-generator is your hookup for ridiculous beats while you code. Why download techno music when you could have https://donkdj.com and this python script add ridiculous beats to your favorite songs? I think this could be an interesting challenge: modify this script to make songs sound like other genres. Go forth and fork!

openpyro is not just another ActionScript based framework for creating RIA’s, it’s an awesome one that’s hosted right here on GitHub. It’s got a sick project page, plenty of docs over at the wiki, and a screencast to boot. If you’re starting a new Flash project or perhaps looking to contribute to a budding framework, make sure to check this out.

auto_tagger solves a tricky problem for many Rails developers: tagging releases that go out on your staging and production servers. This new AutoTagger gem attempts to automate this by creating some handy shortcuts to create and push tags. It also comes baked in with some Capistrano tasks as well that will integrate easily with your existing scripts. If you’re still deploying off your repository’s master branch, perhaps it’s time to look into a more structured process, and this gem can definitely help out.

docu faces a problem that every developer loathes: creating documentation. This project seeks to correct this situation for the .NET world. It already creates some slick RDoc-inspired sites, which you can see for yourself here. Combined with a flexible view template system based on Spark, a single command to whip up your docs, and an very redistributable executable, this may become the new standard for documentation in the .NET ecosystem. There’s already 9 forks after roughly 2 weeks of being online, where’s yours?

ccgus just antiquated AppleScript by releasing JSTalk.

From the blog post announcement:

JSTalk’s goal can described like this: JSTalk is to AppleScript, what Cocoa is to Carbon. [...] You write your scripts in JavaScript, and application communication is handled via Cocoa’s distributed objects. Like PyObjc and RubyCocoa, JSTalk uses a bridge to talk to Cocoa (JSCocoa + WebKit’s JavaScriptCore), so you get all the power and speed that comes with it.

As a fan of both Cocoa and JavaScript, I couldn’t be more excited. Nice work Gus!

Webdesigner Depot has posted a great Intro to Git for Web Designers. It walks through what version control is, why you should use it, the advantages of using Git, and then walks you through Git usage. It’s very thorough and does a great job.

The end of the article contains a ton of great resources, as well – from cheat sheets to walk-throughs.

It’s also a great compliment to ENTP’s similarly titled Git for Designers.

In my crusade to improve our Gem support, I’ve added the ability for you to initiate a Gem build right from the interface. If your Gem build fails, it’s often because of temporary problems with our build system (awesome improvements to that are forthcoming), and another try or two are all it takes to get the build to complete. Here’s how you fire off a new build job for the latest code on your master branch:

Please note that if a gem of that version already exists, this will be a no-op.

Grails, the high-productivity web framework for the Java platform, can now be found on GitHub at https://github.com/grails/grails.

Welcome, Grailers!

Interested in Groovy or Grails? Be sure to check out some of the other Groovy or Grails projects on GitHub.

The venerable joehewitt has release Three20, a handful of UI extractions from the Facebook iPhone app. His announcement blog post details the libraries it contains, shows some demos, and explains why releasing this project took so long.

Looks pretty awesome, be sure to check it out!

casualjim has written a great Git and GitHub Survival Guide over on his blog. It’s great for beginners, especially if they use Windows.

As he says:

Lately I’ve been helping a few people to get started on Github. I use git at the command line and my survival guide is also based on that way of interacting with Git. So I thought I’d write the procedure up so that I can just point people to this page.

Thanks Ivan!

Sorry about the outage – our DNS provider was down.

We’ve switched providers and the original provider is back up, so everything should be okay.

This is just too cool. voloko has created railsapi.com, a downloadable, smart searchable Ruby on Rails API with a great interface.

In addition to all that awesomeness, each method in the docs links to the corresponding method definition on GitHub.

voloko has also open source sdoc, his RDoc fork which generates the doc and links to GitHub. Use it on your own projects today!

Git Guru is a new blog about, well, Git! Recent posts wonder whether Git is ready for the enterprise, discuss rebase vs merge, and review branching strategies. It’s a nice compliment to the always wonderful git ready.

Check it out!

Rebase time is now! What, 5 notably new projects? How did that happen? I just found so much cool stuff this week I couldn’t help myself. Enjoy!

Featured Project

fitnesse is a Java-based wiki that helps to make sure you build the right code for your clients. Based off of Ward Cunningham’s FIT framework, the project focuses collaborative editing of acceptance tests. (Just make sure you don’t misuse it!) Check out some of unclebob’s videos on how to use FitNesse, and definitely make sure to look at the project’s home page which has a wealth of information about agile methods, TDD, and how to use this project in your daily workflow.

Notably New Projects

yammer.net is pretty straightforward: a .NET wrapper for the Yammer API. kdavie has done a great job with setting up an impressive GitHub Page for a project that is barely a week old. This is a great example for other projects to follow and shows how much having a simple gh-pages branch can make your work really shine.

polyeuler is lgastako’s attempt to complete Project Euler in as many programming languages as possible. Um, Project What?

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

If you’re into languages and crazy math problems, give this a look. Maybe you could add your own favorite language in!

wrongzoom is a SIMBL plugin to make the green button on Cocoa apps maximize windows instead of zooming them in to fit content. If that annoys you, it’s definitely worth checking out. This could also be a good base to look at if you want to write a SIMBL plugin for OSX.

every is the freshest batch of syntactic sugar to come out of Rubyland. No seriously, it’s a great shortcut that avoids using Symbol#to_proc. So instead of enum.map {|i| i.floor } or enum.map(&:floor), simply do: enum.every.floor. I’ll be cloning this project once I’m done with this article, and so should you.

reversehttp is an answer to one of HTTP’s problems: polling for updates is bad. With some Erlang magic, this project hopes to make providing services for the web just as easy as requesting services from it. Sponsored by LShift, the company behind RabbitMQ, this project is definitely going places. Check out the project’s website, the specification of how it should work, and some small demos in action.

In the spirit of the Clojure Gitorial and Ramaze by Example, the Grizzly OSGi HTTP Service Gitorial walks you through the creation of an HTTP service for Grizzly, a Java framework designed to help developers to take advantage of the NIO API.

Nice work, neotyk!

https://github.com/miyagawa/github-growler