Haystack tweaks for Django 1.7.7. I had to upgrade to Haystack 2.3.1 to get it to work with Django 1.7.7. I also had to update the Xapian backend. But I ran into problems. On my laptop anyway (Ubuntu 14.0.4), xapian gets mad when search terms are greater than 245 chars (or something) when indexing. So I created a custom field that would simply omit terms greater than 64 chars and used this field everywhere I previously used a CharField. Secondly, the custom search form was broken now. Something changed in the Xapian backend and exact searches stopped working. Fortunately the auto_query (which I was using originally and broke during an upgrade) started working again. So I cut the search form back over to doing an auto_query. I kept the form the same (3 fields) because I didn't want to change the form and I think it's better that way.

"""Abstracts the list of users in the IRC channel."""

from redis import RedisError

from core.services import get_redis_connection

def get_users():
    """Return a list of users in the IRC channel."""
    conn = get_redis_connection()
    try:
        nicks = conn.get('irc:channel_members')
    except RedisError:
        nicks = None

    return nicks.split() if nicks else []