class Organization(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    url = models.URLField(verify_exists=False)
    orgtype = models.ForeignKey(OrgType)

The same model class in Rails typically looks like this:

class Organization < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :OrgType
end

…and in Grails it is more specific like Django:

class Organization {
  String name
  String url
  static belongsTo = OrgType
  OrgType orgtype
}

It took me a while to remember that in Rails, parts of the model design is actually stored in the database schema instead of in the Ruby code. Peculiar don’t you think, given that everything else in a Rails app is nicely declared in Ruby code? There are of course benefits to both approaches, but I have started adding comments in the Rails model classes to be able to remember what properties they have without peeking in the Db. Typically I have a number of half-baked projects on my laptop and from time to time I forget what they do and these comments help me remember.

Check out more examples here:

• Django models
• Rails models
• Grails models

I am a fast reader which comes with the tradeoff of missing important information sometimes. Skimming through the terms for using the API I was a bit disappointed at first. That was because I was only reading the first column in the table that lists the previous terms of use. Oh well. The second column that lists the current restrictions (or rather lack of restrictions) makes it clear that Yahoo search is very easy to get started with. It is almost so that you start wondering where Yahoo will make money from providing a service like that.

Anyway, here are the five simple steps to get Yahoo search integrated in your Django site:

1. Get an API Key

…or “application ID” as Yahoo calls it. Visit this page to sign up for an API key.

2. Install the pYsearch library

Download pYsearch from Sourceforge to your computer (here is the direct link to the package), and:

tar xvf pYsearch-3.1.tar.gz

cd pYsearch

sudo python setup.py build

sudo python setup.py install

This should install pYsearch somewhere on your Python path.

3. Set up URL-pattern and view method

In your urls.py add a URL-pattern to pick up search requests. We’ll use queries like /search/?q=myquery:

url(r'^search/$', 'myapp.views.search', name='site_search'),

Set up the view method in your application’s views.py (make sure the search query is encoded to utf-8 to enable characters outside ISO-8859-1 in the query parameter):

from yahoo.search.web import WebSearch

def search(request):
	query = request.GET.get("q", "").encode("utf-8")

	if len(query) > 0:

		#Call yahoo!
		api_key = "[your api key]"
		srch = WebSearch(api_key)
		srch.site = "www.example.com" #restrict to your own site
		srch.query = query
		srch.results = 50
		result = srch.parse_results() #puts all result items into a dict

	return render_to_response('search/search.html', locals())

4. And now the search form and result template

Add the search field and form somewhere on your site:

<form action="/search/" method="GET">
	<div>
	<label for="q"">Find:</label>
	<input type="text" name="q" accesskey="4" size="30" id="q" value="{{query}}">
	<input type="submit" value="Search">
	</div>
</form>

The base.html sets up the basic web page. This template lives in myapp/templates/search/search.html

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% block content %}
	{% if result.results %}
        <ul class="searchresult">
	{% for item in result %}
	<li>
           <h2><a href="{{item.Url}}">{{item.Title}}</a></h2>
           <p>{{item.Summary|cut:" ..."}}...</p>
        </li>
        {% endfor %}
        </ul>
{% else %}
Suggestion:
<ul>
	<li>Check your spelling.</li>
	<li>Try similar words.</li>
</ul>
{% endif %}
{% endblock %}

5. There is no step 5!

That’s it! Your site should now have a nice search engine. Some issues you may encounter:

1. Yahoo does not seem to have indexed all of eutveckling.se yet. This means that the result set will be limited. No PDF documents seem to have been included (searching for “Vägledningen 24-timmarswebben” does not return the PDF document even though it has many links on the site). It would be nice to be able to see how much of the site that the search engine knows about.
2. The summary text for each page seems to be the same (including hidden skiplink text). This may be my fault as I haven’t provided meta description elements yet. I have added som CSS classnames (robots-nocontent) to navigation elements to help the search engine decide on what should be included and what should be skipped. I had expected that the summary would contain a phrase close to the query term instead of text from the top of the page.

Given the following URL:

http://example.com/items/?order_by=name

…Django will ignore the query part when determining a cache key so the key for the above request will be:

/items/

Any type of query parameter will make Django ignore the cached page. Django will not create a new cache item for the order_by request. This will be detrimental for the performance of your site. I had expected Django to create three different cache items for these URLs instead of one cache item and two ignored requests:

• http://example.com/items/

• http://example.com/items/?order_by=name

• http://example.com/items/?order_by=date

The solution

Fortunately Django’s source is very readable and easy to adapt to your own needs. A few minor changes to middleware/cache.py and utils/cache.py and you are ready to go. For details see the patch I attached to ticket 4992.

I recently deployed a Django site to get an overview of VPS hosting plans and the ability to cache items based on the filtering parameters gives much better performance.