I thought I’d start the blog with an introduction to me, but when I sat down to write, I came up with this instead:
Last month, I worked on a project that involved letting people select the make and model of their car on a website. I thought that there had to be some super-simple control to install that would let me do this automatically - so many other websites seem to have this information.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t.
Everywhere I looked, people wanted $50 or more just for a database (of dubious quality) of car models. Finally, I found a good free database at yearmakemodeldatabase.com/. I still had to integrate it with Django and create controls that would let people select their particular car easily. No one wants to use a select menu with 44,000 options, nor do they want to wait for it to download!
So, I created an open source Django app, django-vehicles, that you can just include in your project to immediately have access to form controls and Django models that will represent automobile makes and models. I also cleaned up the data a little bit and added 2010 models from the US by searching around on the web for recent lists.
If you find this useful, please let me know here.
Also, if you have any feature requests, contact me directly. I won’t update the code if no one is using it. Two things I’d think about adding are a specification for whether the car was available in the US or not and also update the data with 2011 models.