As I was running through the weblog example in James Bennett’s excellent “Practical Django Projects (2nd Ed)” book I ran across a problem. In the book, we are asked to create a custom manager for the Entry model.

Instead of pulling all entries, the custom manager only pull the entries that have been marked as LIVE (and ignores the ones that are marked HIDDEN or DRAFT).

This custom manager is set as the _default_manager (by defining it first in the Entry class), which is fine, except for the fact that the Django admin interface “defaults” to using the default manager of a class. In the admin, I want to see and edit ALL objects, not just the live ones.

UPDATE! Even better than listing out the individual errors, Phil Gyford has posted his working code for the examples in James Bennet’s “Practical Django Projects 2nd Edition“. You can find it on bitbucket here. Thanks Phil!

Since a quick Google search failed to turn up these e-book errate for James Bennets informative “Practical Django Projects 2nd Edition”, I’ll compile my own list. Hopefully my frustration in overcoming these errors will save you from the same.

Chapter 4, page 66:

(r'^weblog/(?P<year>\d{4})/(?P<month>\w{3})/(?P<day>\d{2})/(P?<slug>[-\w]+)/$',
'coltrane.views.entry_detail'),

should be:

(r'^weblog/(?P<year>\d{4})/(?P<month>\w{3})/(?P<day>\d{2})/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$',
'coltrane.views.entry_detail'),

(note the “P?” vs. “?P” before <slug>)

Chapter 4, page 70

Author should mention that the following must be added to the top of urls.py once you switch to generic views:

from coltrane.models import Entry

Chapter 4, page 71 and 73

Each of the four urlpatterns which include:

weblog/(?P<year>\d{4}/

Should actually be:

weblog/(?P<year>\d{4})/

(note the “)” after the {4})