Audit trail or audit log is a chronological sequence of audit records, each of which contains evidence directly pertaining to and resulting from the execution of a business process or system function.

How does this come into play in a web application?

Lets examine the case of a simple application for keeping track of a store’s inventory:

In the most simple case there would be a single database table in which we’d keep details on different products in the store. In the case where multiple users would have access to INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE records in the products table, one user could insert a product with name, description and price, later another user could change the description or even delete the whole record. If at some later point we wanted to restore the original record or see who made the latest changes we’d have to ask all the users to remember what they did. An audit log for this table would provide the means of keeping track of all the changes that were made to it and who made the changes in a chronological order.

django-audit-log provides such facilities for your Django models.

It’s designed to be very simple to add chronological tracking to any django model with the least amount of changes to your existing code. Adding an audit log for your models is done in three steps:

1. Add a middleware class in settings.py.
2. Add a manager property to every model you need to keep track of.
3. Execute the syncdb management command.

To keep track of all the changes a separate table will be created for each tracked model. This table would have the same column structure as the original model plus columns for tracking the time, type of action (create, change or delete) and user who did the action. Queries on the audit log for a model are made via the manager added in step 2.

The project is still under heavy development and there’s no official release yet. Keep that in mind if you consider using it in production. The code can be downloaded from the mercurial repository:

hg clone https://django-audit-log.googlecode.com/hg/ django-audit-log

Basic usage instructions can be found on this wiki page.  Feature requests are always welcome.

Details on how it works and extension points will be coming up on the project wiki page soon.

Figured we should share our enthusiasm and officially thank Nathan Smith for his wonderful CSS framework and for being so down-to-earth. Very interested in working to develop better systems to work with 960.

As a bonus (and since it’s Christmas time), here is a J.K.D. (taking the best of everything) template I made that is based off 960.gs that includes:

• jQuery
• Meyer’s Reset
• BluePrint forms.css and alerts
• Particle Tree buttons
• Boagworld’s Fixed Footer
• FamFamFam’s Silk Icons (to compliment the buttons)
• Quick & Custom garbage type.css (which you can and should modify anyway)

DEMO ARCHON TEMPLATE
DOWNLOAD ARCHON TEMPLATE

“Why Archon?”
I played a lot of StarCraft and figure that template is close to templar and when you smush a bunch of templars together, you get an archon.

How do I use this thing?!
Use 960.ls to make your grid.css, overwrite existing one. Same with everything inside #wrapper in your example.htm. Tada!
Now go to layout.css, change your backgrounds for your header, container, and footer (scrolling and content areas for all – shawing).

First person to use this and ask a question gets a free screencast that will replace this sentence and encourage me to clean up the template.

Template Bonuses:
This design works particularly well if you are 980px layout with 20px gutters. I’ve included:

• Sketch Files
• Workable Column .PSD that you should copy/paste for re-usability (12, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2)