This package allows you to use the Django ORM within Plone.

It takes care to merge Django transaction management within Zope's own transaction manager.

In order to use this package you must have a setup that looks like the following:

1. Your settings module must be within buildout's "adjusted" sys.path. This means it should be importable from within Plone, hence that it should be an egg (either released or more commonly in development). Jacob Kaplan-Moss explains how to do this for a Django buildout.
2. Your buildout should contain both the Plone parts and the Django parts together, hence the standard Plone buildouts plus the bits you see in Jacob's tutorial. Make sure that your plone instance has, within its eggs, the project one (shorturls in Jacob's example) either derived from buildout's ones or local to the instance.

The second step is to make sure that your Plone instance has a special environment variable that Django needs to know where its settings are. Hence put, under your instance buildout section, something like this:

[buildout]
...
[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
...
environment-vars =
    DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE shorturls.testsettings

Again values are borrowed from Jacob's post.

Then just add the egg to your buildout, like this:

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    ...
    collective.django

The package itself relies on z3c.autoinclude to load its ZCML when Plone is pulled up. In case this does not work, include a:

<include package="collective.django" />

Within your package ZCML.

And whenever you will import your Django models from Plone, the transaction will be managed by Zope.

To run the tests, a minimal buildout is included. After checking out the source code, run the following:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout
$ bin/test

And the tests should be ran.