JADDOG

I had another chance today to enjoy a reflection on the Chistmas songs we carolled at our Christmas Party last week. It seems the simples truths are often the blessings that touch us most.

As part of Christmas I’ve had the opportunity to read Luke chapter 2 with my family a couple times and was blessed by its correlation to the song Angels we have heard on high.

Angels we have heard on high is about angels and shepards giving “Glory to God in the highest” that Christ the savior is born.

In Luke 2 the angels appeared to the shepards and gave them the good news about Chirst’s birth. They’re surrounded by heavenly hosts and sing “Glory to God in the highest.” Once the shepards have followed the angel’s instructions and found Christ in the manger they give glory to God and sing his praises.

On a kinda comical note I am spending my Christmas watching Home Alone in my recently “made into a family room” basement which we moved our TV into but have no furniture in. So we’re all in sleeping bags on the floor.

Meanwhile my wife, brother-in-law (the two of them choose the movie) and sister-in-law are out cold sleeping through the movie.

I choose to journal my reflections on giving “Glory to God in the highest” instead of paying attention to the movie.

Merry Christmas.

I had fun the past couple days working with django-cms. During my time with the current release (svn r41) I noticed that django-cms 2.0 is planned. So I figured I’d try it out and document my experience. Maybe a couple tickets or bug requests will come of my little endeavor. I’m using Fedora 10, python 2.5.2 and Django 1.0. I’m following the instructions loosely at http://trac.django-cms.org/trac/wiki/GettingStarted and http://trac.django-cms.org/trac/wiki/ServingMediaFiles. Here’s the steps I got through tonight and the results I came up with.

I started with pulling down the code from the repo.

$ svn co http://svn.django-cms.org/branches/django-cms2

Got revision 177 today. Start a fresh django project. Change dir into the project folder and soft link in the cms and mptt directories from the svn checkout. Also make a media directory in the project directory and inside the media directory link the cms media so the admin can see it later.

$ django-admin.py startproject djangocms2
$ ln -s ../svn/django-cms2/cms/
$ ln -s ../svn/django-cms2/mptt/
$ ln -s ../cms/media/cms/

Here’s a diff of the changes I made to the default settings.py and url.py files. django-cms2.diffs

I also had to make one modification to the django-cms code to get the admin media working right for the page object. Diff for that is in that file too. Didn’t really spend the time to figure if the fix I made fits into the conventions django-cms is using, just got it working for now. So now go ahead and sync the db and run the dev server:

$ ./manage.py syncdb
$ ./manage.py runserver

Results:
As expected http://localhost:8000/ gave me an error. This is ok. I got this error in the current release too. Resolution in the current release was to go create a page. I first updated my site object in the django admin, this is important. Django-cms 2.0 seems to be dependent on the sites infrastructure. At http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/sites/site/1/ I updated domain name to ‘localhost:8000′ and display name to ‘Localhost Test Server’

Next I tried to create a page. At http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/cms/page/add/ I set the title to ‘Home’ and the slug populated automagically with ‘home’. Hit save and got a template error. Django-cms 2.0 doesn’t have a base template the same way the current version does. Create a templates directory in your project directory and copy the index.html template in the example site to this templates directory.

This seems like a good stopping point. Cms is configured and you can see a page by this point. I’ll be working with the cms to find what features are setup beyond this point and hope to make another post when I have more to share.

I picked out a couple songs for our home group to sing when we went Christmas Caroling at our Christmas party the other night. Songs were O come O come Emmanuel, Angels we have heard on high, Joy to the world and Silent Night. When I play music for our home group I usually like to share my reflections on the songs before we sing them. I was very encouraged by the song set and wanted to journal about my reflections.

O come, O come Emmanual is a song about Israel desiring that a Saviour would come and set them free from their bondage
Angels we have heard on high is a song about Angels and Shepards giving praise to God that the Savior has been born
Joy to the World is a song expressing the joy in receiving our Savior’s reign over the curse
Silent Night is a song about baby Jesus in the manger at his birth

Simple enough right? We’ve sung these song over and over, though, I really enjoyed taking some time to not just sing them again this year but really consider what’s being sung. Our Savior has come to set us free from death’s reign. Let’s celebrate the season giving praise to our God that he has sacrificed himself that we might live eternally giving him praise and honor.

Merry Christmas!