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

Account management


So far we have implemented session management and registration facilities. We now need to let the user update account information, such as the password or email address. To implement such features, we can do one of the two things:

  • We can use the views that Django provides for common account management tasks as we did while creating the login form

  • We can design our own form and process its input data as we did with the registration form

We've seen how to use both approaches. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, designing your own form gives you greater control, but it requires more code. On the other hand, using a Django view is faster, but in this case you are limited to the form offered by Django. In the end, it's up to you to decide which approach to use.

I will summarize the views provided by the django.contrib.auth application. Each view expects a certain template name to be available and passes some variables to this template. Input handling...