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django oscar and djangocms

I am interested in combining django-cms for content management and django oscar for e-commerce.
Can someone give me some direction, preferably someone that has already successfully combined the two:
[A] Should the structure be a base oscar site, with the oscar templates modified to insert the necessary placeholders to permit cms etc...,
OR
[B] Should the structure be a base django-cms site, with oscar being handled by plugins etc...
My gut feeling is that it should be [A], but please correct me if I am wrong.
Any other suggestions would be appreciated, as there is little online, and I have written to the author of oscar with no response. I am aware of THIS link, which doesn't address implementation, only comparing compatibilities.

This combination is something that I've been looking at for a while and actually had a working prototype. Without knowing your full use case it's difficult to advise properly.
What I required sounds very similar to you, a site that can have CMS editable pages on the same sub domain (e.g. www.myshop.uk/shop www.myshop.uk/cms-pages) as the oscar provided pages. I wanted to have the initial homepage driven by the CMS and a separate area of the site for the E-commerce pages.
If your requirements are the same as mine, the best way to achieve the integration is via an app hook in Django CMS, this would mean that the CMS is the controlling package: http://docs.django-cms.org/en/release-3.3.x/how_to/apphooks.html
I used the following documentation, the code didn't work on more recent versions of Oscar and CMS but was a good guide of what should be possible and a push in the right direction: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/djangocms-oscar/0.1
I will be attempting this again very soon as I have a new site where the CMS and E-commerce site are separate and need merging under the same sub domain.
Is this still an issue for you?
I am considering either contacting the author about updating the previous project "djangocms-oscar" or creating a new one with supporting docs for others.

I have worked on the very similar configuration you have asked here. A pure blend of django-cms with django-oscar.
Here's what I did and it works perfectly fine.
First setup a new project with cookiecutter-django-cms
Then install django-oscar inside it.
Setup your shop.
As long as I know, it works fine.

Are there any good options for baking out a Django site as static files?

Say you have an existing database-backed Django site. Something simple, like single model containing a record for every minor league baseball team. The model is accessed by one view that lists all the teams, and another that accepts a slug and then creates a detail page all about that team.
Is there a good option for converting the app into a stack of baked out flat files, so that it could be served from a static file service like Amazon's S3?
I've toyed with Hyde but it's not clear to me how it applies to an existing site backed by a database.
Any advice would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

django-medusa is largely unmaintained. These are some alternatives mentioned in the project's README:
django-bakery, built and maintained the lovely people at the Los Angeles Times Data Desk. (Read about it
here.)
The alsoicode/django-medusa fork, by Brandon
Taylor. Among other things, it's been
kept up to date for newer versions of Django.
django-freeze by Fabio Caccamo.
django-staticgen by Mishbah Razzaque.

I understand your intent, but any decent framework these days offers some sort of caching mecanism that alleviate the pains of dynamic content. With a properly implemented cache, the difference between static and dynamic will be trivial. Trust me.
Happy coding, friend.

A new one has just been announced, though it has existed and been used by its author for quite some time:
django-medusa.
I haven't tried using it yet, but it sure looks good: I will be!

I have a similar setup using Django but on GAE. I have created a build script which I use to build my static HTML files. Since GAE's version of Django templates is slightly different, this might need some testing.
But essentially you do something like
from django.template import Template, Context
from django.template.loader import get_template
t = get_template('template1.html') #Need to verify this. GAE template allows me to just call template.render(path, context). Not sure about pure Django templates
c = Context({ 'variable' : 'value'})
with open("file1.html", "w") as f:
f.write(t.render(c)) #This works for me, but if this doesn't in pure Django, try render_to_string
HTH

You are asking for a dynamic site to host in a static environment, that is impossible. The only way is to export all the files, put them into a static server. You can do it with wget, it will copy all the files and convert them to html.
One fallback of this problem is, it can only create html files, if there are links to the pages, ie. search forms etc. will not work, Javascript based linking may not work.

I'm not familiar with anything that will convert an existing django site to a static html site. It might be worth looking at the suite of new django/python PaaS providers. A site like this should be easy to get running on one of these platforms and it should be pretty cheap month to month.
Some providers you might want to checkout include:
Gondor.io
ep.io
Django Zoom

News sources for python django

I find myself continually sifting through the net to keep up with Python/Django/web development trends and news. Does anyone recommend any good news sites that focus on web development or they Python community? For example, what new Django modules are popular or interesting new jQuery plugins, etc. Just curious to know how others keep their knowledge up to date.

The Django community aggregator is a great source of news and information about what people are doing with Django.

Coder.io lists Django news too but Django's own community page is my primary source.
http://coder.io/tag/django

Django Dose is great. They have a bit or erratic updates (but they're back to posting again), but when they do, they really pick up the most interesting developments, both in trunk and around the community. Also the django sub-reddit is pretty good too, most things tend to come that way.

I run a Tumblr blog called Djangoed which picks out the best/interesting stories from various sources (including the community aggregator, Django Sites and Reddit amongst others).

Using Django CMS

I know python and have just read a basic intro of django. I have to built something like a travel website with real time updates. Will django be sufficent for this? Somebody advised me to look at django-CMS, I couldn't find a very beginner's tutorial there. Should I opt for django-CMS? Also how much of django should i know before i can try out django-cms?
Edit: Not too much real time stuff but just updates on the fly, like availibilty etc. Do i really need CMS?
Thanks

From your brief description it sounds like the main part of you project will be something that manages travel information and displays it to visitors to a website. This definitely sounds like something Django would be perfect for.
Django projects tend to be very modular, so the content management part of you code would likely be completely distinct from the travel parts of your project. Personally I'd start with the core travel functionality, rather than start out with worrying about content management. Then once you have that in place you'll be better positioned to decide whether django-cms fits your content needs, or whether something hand rolled will do.
Start by defining your models for the travel application. Then register those models with the admin. Get happy with how the data is modelled and then try and create one of the basic views. You should have something up and running pretty quickly.
You might also be interested in the GeoDjango project http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/GeoDjango which provides lots of geographical and mapping tools - which sounds pretty relevant to your project.

I would say no. Django CMS is well designed, if you change content frequently. It has nice features to build up a page. But that means it only shows its benefits, when you create a lot pages/subpages and so on.
For a simple website that only presents data, without adding new pages/views, Django will suffice.
And from my experience, you should at lest be familiar with Views and URLs in order to use Django CMS well. But the same applies to Django itself. Everything else can be found on google.
Hope that helps.

Multiple-instance Django forum software

Does anyone know of a django forum plugin that allows each member to have his own forum? If there isn't anything, than what would be the best way to accomplish this with a "regular" forum plugin for Django?

I once created a feature matrix of all Django forum apps I could find. It might be a bit outdated now, though (contributions welcome).
At least django-threadedcomments uses generic foreign keys, so you can attach a message thread to any database object, including users.

Look at DjangoBB.

Yep, the forum app of SCT can be used for this - simply set it up and create multiple "community Groups" (these are similar to vhosts) and map them to subdomains - each community group would have separate forum categories, can have separate templates, separate user permissions, etc. (but they will obviously share the same django users and their profiles) - as an example.. the following websites are all hosted on the same instance:
SCT website
My personal website/blog (the blog is also based on SCTs forum)
ShelfShare Community

Check out diamanda. I'm not sure it does what you need as far as the each user having its forums, but that's probably not too hard to hack on top. Probably as simple as adding a few ForeignKeys into auth.User to the diamanda models. In general django pluggables and djangoapps are good places to look for django stuff that is already written. Also, check out pinax.

I believe the Sphene Community Tools can do this.