I've continued work on upgrading to Django 3 - which has turned out to be a lot more involved than originally suspected. At this point aldryn_categories and aldryn_people have both needed to be pulled into the repository tree since they're also abandoned projects that were abandoned prior to upgrading for Django 3 (though the actually changes needed in them was minimal, they won't work as-is with Django 3). Every time I've thought I was close I've discovered new problems.

One of the recurring problem I've been hitting is making sure to completely clean these as independently installed Python packages while pulling them into our source tree, though I think I have all the dependencies sorted out at this point I've learned the best policy is to wipe out all the Python packages on my test instance and reinstall them from requirements.txt.

And with this blog post my blog posts required count should return to 0, making up for the first two weeks when my administrative access needed to work on the side prevented me from posting.

I've been working to finish our update to Django 3 (which includes moving from aldryn newsblog as a dependency to an incorporated app). I've hit a lot of frustration doing this but am wrapping this up tonight.

I've also been working on general code cleanup, primarily replacing database queries that assume a single result with better queries and checking the results. This code seems to be causing a vast majority of bugs - especially with returning students.

This is a quick check-in post to keep the blog count happy (most of this was covered in weekly mentor meeting)

I've wrapped up work on #394 and #396, then started work on #370, #383, #387, and #400.

This week I've been largely focused on blog posting bugs, notably #394 and #396. These two bugs are not actually part of the python-blogs codebase, but the now-abandoned aldryn newsblog projected which we use as a dependency.

Since aldryn_newsblog is abandoned and its repository set permanently read-only, the first step was pull that module into the python-blogs tree. After spending a few hours unsuccessfully attempting to merge aldryn_newsblog's commit history into a python-blogs branch, then merge its branch with the master, I gave up and just copied aldryn_newsblog's final version as a subdirectory (abandoning its 5 years of commit history in the process). Someday, if anyone really cares and has more git experience than me, they can always run this merge "correctly".

$ pip uninstall aldryn_newsblog

Uninstalling aldryn-newsblog-2.2.1:
  Would remove:
    /usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/aldryn_newsblog-2.2.1.dist-info/*
    /usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/aldryn_newsblog/*
Proceed (y/n)? 
 

So long global module, hello local module, and - the website still works.

I'm now staring at the mess that is our tag cleaning. There appears to be at least three HTML cleaners used by the python-blogs codebase, but embarrassingly I found most of #394 can be resolved by adding tags to gsoc/settings.py and appears to have almost nothing to do with aldryn_newsblog.