VSzA techblog

Although asciimoo unofficially abandoned it for potion, I've been using f33dme with slight modifications as a feed reader since May 2011. On 4^th May 2013, Debian released Wheezy, so when I upgraded the server I ran my f33dme instance on, I got Django 1.4 along with it. As with major upgrades, nothing worked after the upgrade, so I had to tweak the code to make it work with the new release of the framework.

First of all, the database configuration in settings.py were just simple key-value pairs like DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3', these had to be replaced with a more structured block like the one below.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'sqlite3',
        ...
    }
}

Then starting the service using manage.py displayed the following error message.

Error: One or more models did not validate:
admin.logentry: 'user' has a relation with model
    <class 'django.contrib.auth.models.User'>, which
    has either not been installed or is abstract.

Abdul Rafi wrote on Stack Overflow that such issues could be solved by adding django.contrib.auth to INSTALLED_APPS, and in case of f33dme, it was already there, I just had to uncomment it. After this modification, manage.py started without problems, but rendering the page resulted in the error message below.

ImproperlyConfigured: Error importing template source loader
    django.template.loaders.filesystem.load_template_source: "'module'
    object has no attribute 'load_template_source'"

Searching the web for the text above led me to another Stack Overflow question, and correcting the template loaders section in settings.py solved the issue. Although it's not a strictly Django-related problem, but another component called feedparser also got upgraded and started returning such values that resulted in TypeError exceptions, so the handler in fetch.py also had to be extended to deal with such cases.

With the modifications described above, f33dme now works like a charm, although deprecation warnings still get written to the logs both from Django and feedparser, but these can be dealt with till the next Debian upgrade, and until then, I have a working feed reader.