Book Image

Django Project Blueprints

By : Asad Jibran Ahmed
Book Image

Django Project Blueprints

By: Asad Jibran Ahmed

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level web framework that eases the creation of complex, database-driven websites. It emphasizes on the reusability and pluggability of components, rapid development, and the principle of don't repeat yourself. It lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications quickly. There are several Django tutorials available online, which take as many shortcuts as possible, but leave you wondering how you can adapt them to your own needs. This guide takes the opposite approach by demonstrating how to work around common problems and client requests, without skipping the important details. If you have built a few Django projects and are on the lookout for a guide to get you past the basics and to solve modern development tasks, this is your book. Seven unique projects will take you through the development process from scratch, leaving no stone unturned. In the first two projects, you will learn everything from adding ranking and voting capabilities to your App to building a multiuser blog platform with a unique twist. The third project tackles APIs with Django and walks us through building a Nagios-inspired infrastructure monitoring system. And that is just the start! The other projects deal with customizing the Django admin to create a CMS for your clients, translating your web applications to multiple languages, and using the Elasticsearch search server with Django to create a high performing e-commerce web site. The seventh chapter includes a surprise usage of Django, and we dive deep into the internals of Django to create something exciting! When you're done, you'll have consistent patterns and techniques that you can build on for many projects to come.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Django Project Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Looking at a Django form


As our aim is to allow users to create dynamic forms based on parameters stored in a database, a good place to start is to look at how a Django form works under the hood and what options we have to customize it. First, let's create a basic form. Create a new main/forms.py file and add the following code to it:

from django import forms

class SampleForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    age = forms.IntegerField()
    address = forms.CharField(required=False)
    gender = forms.ChoiceField(choices=(('M', 'Male'), ('F', 'Female')))

This is a pretty basic form. However, it has a variety of form fields that we can look at. Let's play around a bit in the shell, which you can start as follows:

> python manage.py shell

Tip

I usually like to install another package called ipython. When you start the Django shell with ipython installed, you get an enhanced version of the basic shell with a lot of cool features such as autocomplete and a much better looking interface...