Slingshot - Launch Faster

Launch Faster

Slingshot a suite of tools to make Django development faster and learning Django easier.

The site and tools are pre-alpha, let me know if you'd like to help.

Template Templates

Melding BlueprintCSS, jQuery, and HTML into a clean starting point for your site, these templates follow as many of the best practices and informal conventions as possible. As of 2/20/2011 they are still work in progress.

See a live demo of the templates: magazine and webservice. If you like what you see, download the template templates.

Hackable Apps

The best apps are hackable: elegant implementations of core features that can be understood quickly and customized to your needs. They also include the basic html templates you need to get up and running fast. The first hackable app is django-simple-registration. If you have an app that you think meets the criteria of "hackable," let me know and I'll add it to the list.

Scaffolding Engine

A cure for repetitive boilerplate, the scaffold engine takes a model definition and creates a reasonable starting point for views, urls, forms, and even a basic template. Define your models, tell the scaffolding engine which recipes to use, and it creates a hackable first version for you. download the scaffolding engine


Coming soon

Is this like Pinax?

Not really. Slingshot and Pinax both aim to make development faster and less repetitive, but they do so in very different ways. Whereas Pinax is a sub-framework built on top of Django with its own functions, features, and requirements, Slinghsot is a set of tools to use with Django. It is not easy to separate a pinax app or a pinax template from the pinax stack and run it in a non-pinax djano project. Slingshot, on the other hand, aims to be as unobtrusive as possible, so you can use the tools in any Django project.

The following stack diagram illustrates the difference. Pinax vs Slingshot stack diagrams
Pinax is a software layer that sits between your app and Django, Slingshot is a set of tools that sit next to your app and Django during development.