Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples. Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example. In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.0 Web Site Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface

Putting it all together: generating user pages


This chapter has covered a lot of material. It has introduced the concepts of views, models, and templates. In the final section, we will write another view and make use of all the information that we have learned so far. This view will display a list of all the bookmarks that belong to a certain user.

Creating the URL

The URL of this view will have the form user/username, where username is the owner of the bookmarks that we want to see. This URL is different from the first URL that we added because it contains a dynamic portion. So we will have to employ the power of regular expressions in order to express this URL. Open the urls.py file and edit it so that the URL table looks like this:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
  (r'^$', main_page),
  (r'^user/(\w+)/$', user_page),
)

The pattern here looks more complicated than the first one. \w means an alphanumeric character or an underscore. The + sign after it causes the regular expression to match one or...