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

Customizing the administration interface


The administration interface provided by Django is very powerful and flexible. Activating it only takes a couple of minutes, and this will give you a fully featured administration kit for your site. Although the administration application should be sufficient for most needs, Django offers several ways to customize and enhance it. In addition to specifying which models are available in the administration interface, you can also specify how listing pages are presented. You can even override the templates used to render the administration pages. So let's learn about these features.

Customizing listing pages

As we saw in the previous section, we defined admin classes in a file called admin.py to mark data models as available in the administration interface. These classes are also useful in customizing several aspects of the administration pages.

Let's learn about this with examples. The listing page of bookmarks displays the string representation of each...