Media handling

[perrygeo]

We developed the install_media command back in the day before django.contrib.staticfiles. There is some overlap between the two (namely the copying of static files) and some differences

install_media

• changes ownership (to make sure media is writable)
• compresses css and js
• media folder is not distinct from static

we might want an integrated solution that harnesses the best of both. Mainly it would be nice to leverage the staticfiles app properly, keep media separate from statice, while still retaining the css/js compression

[perrygeo]

Instead of csstidy , we may want to look at
SlimIt (js minifier) cssmin (cssminifier) and integrating them with the compression step?

[perrygeo]

django-pipeline is almost certainly the right solution for this:

http://django-pipeline.readthedocs.org/en/latest/usage.html#collect-static

It handles compression, asset management and staticfiles from all apps. It has some good hooks for custom storage backends if we need to host media on S3. It might be a little disruptive:

• settings would change for managing media
• django template tags might change
• directory structure for apps would change (each app gets a static directory)
• docs and scripts would need to change to use collectstatic instead of install_media. We probably want to wrap it initially and provide a deprecation warning
• unclear how the current media dir would fit into this ... media and static would be seperate so workflow would change slightly.