When it is time to deploy your Satchmo store to your server, you’ll need to set up your store to automatically start on server boot.

To do this, you’ll need to set up an /etc/init.d/storename script. I’ve provided examples of my redhat and debian setup scripts here. Unpack them, and select the appropriate variant, debian or redhat. I suggest you put the “etc” tree into source control for your store, and then just symlink them into place on your server.

So you’re setting up a Satchmo store, but you don’t like how the default store pages look. Possibly you just want to override the layout of the product detail page, how do you do that without having to edit the Satchmo files themselves?

DjangoCon 2008 wrapped up yesterday, and it was a great weekend for Django and for Django’s leading e-commerce system, Satchmo.

Chris Moffitt and I made a technical presentation (view as a PDF) about Satchmo to a group of 50-70 developers on Saturday. It was videotaped for upload to YouTube, but doesn’t that the Google staff have uploaded it yet. I’ll be sure to make a post when that happens.

First Core Meeting

For the first time ever, the Satchmo core development team actually met face-to-face. The panels and discussions at DjangoCon made it completely worth my time and money to attend the convention, but even had they not been so useful, the trip would have been worth it just for the chance to meet and hang out with my fellow core developers.

We decided on our “Road to 0.8 release” strategy. We’re going to clean up the code & docs, closing as many tickets as possible in the next two or three weeks. In the meantime, Jag is going to be testing his shiny new Order Admin screens. When he’s ready, we’ll release!

The 0.8 release will be pinned to Django 1.0, making it much easier for us to tell people what version of Django to use. It is getting quite old to have to repeatedly specify “rev such-and-such” to new users on the Satchmo-Users list.

Initial 1.0 Discussion

Following 0.8, we’re going to work on a six-month release cycle, trying to fairly closely follow the Django Project’s newly announced intention to start doing timed releases.

We came up with quite a list of new or modified functionality we’d like to see in 1.0, but the primary driving force is going to be a very thorough and exciting refactor of the Product Model. Our intention is to make it much easier to allow store owners and developers to create products which exactly fit the specific needs of their store.

[tags]djangocon,satchmo[/tags]

I’ve finally committed the single most requested feature for Satchmo. “Multi-Shop” allows one installation of Satchmo to serve many shops on different domains.

I use and prefer Lighttpd for serving my Django applications. Over time I have worked out a configuration which allows me to serve the app through fastcgi in both http and https. The media files are directly served by Lighty, without hitting the Django backend at all, for maximum speed.

Also, this configuration allows me to directly serve the media files through ssl without having to get a separate certificate for the web server. Lastly, it serves both “www” and “non-www” versions of the domain, automatically redirecting “www” traffic.

When setting up my latest Satchmo site for Farinaz Taghavi, one of the last steps to push her live was to set up SSL for her.

This isn’t tricky, but it can be easy to forget a step or two, which is why I’ve written this step-by-step guide.