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Ooh-Ga-Boo-Ga

eCommerce, Island Style — Saturday, 20th December, 2008

One of Django's 'killer apps' is Satchmo, an excellent e-commerce platform that enables Django-powered shopping sites to be built with ease. This weeks interview is with Bruce Kroeze, Satchmo core developer and builder of one of the first major Satchmo sites, Ooh-Ga-Boo-Ga.

Vital Stats

• Only 1200 lines of Python code (on top of Satchmo & Django)
• 87 HTML templates
• Only a single entry-level VPS is required

The Down-Low

Ooh-ga-boo-gah is a specialty webshop that sells high quality items from "Ooh-ga-boo-gah island" (Hawaii.) Mark McVey, the owner, is the fictional "Chief Ooh-ga-boo-gah" who reigns over the peaceful island nation.

The website is targetted at people who love island life, and who want to bring a touch of it into their lives. The site offers everything from desktop backgrounds and videos professionally shot by the chief all the way to dresses, surf boards and tiki idols.

Bruce Kroeze of Solid Site Solutions was approached by a marketing executive to do the technical portion of the website, whilst the marketing company's own team did the design and built the flash-based components for the website. Bruce explains that this is a normal way for him to work, adding "we are more of a collective of professionals who work very well together in our areas of expertise. We think there is a synergy from having worked together for years, but if you want to use your own people, that's fine.".

An avid Python programmer with 20 years of programming under his belt, Bruce has been using Django since it's early days as an open source project. His first Django project was updating his play-by-post RPG website, Invisible Castle to Django. Invisible Castle receives enough traffic for Bruce to consider it a trial by fire for Django, which cemented it's place in his portfolio for future projects.

The client, Mark, had a big vision to the Ooh-Ga-Boo-Ga project, bringing in two graphic designers and a flash developer to assist Bruce with the website. The team spent 4 months working before their initial release.

Initially the website was slated to go ahead with either Zencart or Cubecart, two PHP-based products, although they were rejected due to Bruce's concerns about fragility of the code in the heavily-modified project they were tackling. Bruce instead suggested a Django and Satchmo powered solution due to his ability to customize it in ways he didn't see possible with the other products. Worried about suggesting as-yet unproven technology, Bruce asked his client. "Mark was completely supportive of this radical (at the time) choice. He knew he was asking for the moon, and he trusted me when I said that Satchmo could do it.".

Throughout the development process, Bruce relied heavily on a number of Django's built-in features such as unit testing, template tags and signals. "The combination of signals and template tags alone have saved me many dozens of hours of work" says Bruce, soon after mentioning that his preferred style of logging, integrated testing, and interactive investigation via command-line tools was complemented by Django's built-in functionality.

As he was working a number of months before the world would see Django 1.0, the entire project was built using current trunk versions of both Django and Satchmo. Regular updates were required to both Django and Satchmo to fix outstanding bugs or gain access to new features, which required continuous re-working to keep up to date.

"This led to several uncomfortable conversations with Mark where I had to explain why something that was working last week was now blowing up." says Bruce, although Mark was understanding enough to allow many new features he had paid to have developed donated to the Satchmo open-source project.

There isn't much that Bruce things Django needs to remain a great framework other than denormalized database fields and label-style fields, both of which he believes will greatly enhance Satchmo's usability and performance.

To make his development life easier, Bruce made use of a number of other open source products including django-command-extensions to simplify routine maintenance tasks, and nose to enhance Python's unit tests. Most of his websites are powered by Lighttpd, which he recommends for all Satchmo users.

Having been a Satchmo contributor for a long period of time now, Bruce has recently started a Satchmo support site called Go Satchmo to provide help to those getting started with the framework. There is also a Satchmo book on the way, which should be launched alongside Satchmo 1.0 in 2009. In case these projects and his clients don't keep him busy enough, Bruce is working on a number of related tools such as Adobe AIR and mobile phone interfaces for Satchmo store owners. These fun diversions keep life interesting and allow him to continue to learn new technologies that can be integrated with Django.

After interviewing Bruce, he asked me to pass on a message to the Django community at large: "My sincere thanks for a great, vibrant framework based on real-world needs." Hear, hear.

Thanks

Special thanks go to Bruce Kroeze for this interview.

Ooh-Ga-Boo-Ga can be visited at http://oohgabooga.com/. It is also listed at DjangoSites.org.

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© Copyright 2008 Ross Poulton. All Rights Reserved. Django is a registered trademark of the Django Software Foundation.