Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By : Jesse Legg
Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By: Jesse Legg

Overview of this book

<p>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 provides an excellent basis to build e-commerce websites because it can be deployed fast and it responds quickly to changes due to its ability to handle content problems. Django with its proven strengths is all you need to build powerful e-commerce applications with a competitive edge. <br /><br />This book explores how the Django web framework and its related technologies can power the next leap forward for e-commerce and business on the Web. It shows you how to build real-world applications using this rapid and powerful development tool.<br /><br />The book will enable you to build a high quality e-commerce site quickly and start making money. It starts with the ambitious task of using Django to build a functional e-commerce store in less than 30 minutes, and then proceeds to enhance this design through the rest of the book. The book covers the basics of an e-commerce platform like product catalogs, shopping carts, and payment processing. By the end of the book, you will be able to enhance the application by adding a fully-functional search engine, generating PDF-based reports, adding interactivity to the user-interface, selling digital goods with micropayments, and managing deployment and maintenance tasks.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Django 1.2 e-commerce
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Creating product ratings


One of the innovations in e-commerce web applications has been the use of user-generated content in the form of product reviews and ratings. We've seen some of this in our implementation of customer reviews earlier in the book: users could write short comments about any product in the product catalog. This is too much unstructured information, however. Numeric or star ratings are a more structured alternative that can be provided by users more simply. We can use this as a form of feedback, too, and generate an average rating for all of our products.

Ratings are intended to be quick, easy feedback for customers who wish to contribute, but are not interested in writing a full comment. Many ratings examples exist and it is now a well recognized and even expected idiom for web-based product catalogs.

Using traditional HTTP POST forms, though, does not provide the user experience we would like. It is almost a requirement that we use JavaScript for this type of interaction...