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Web Development with Django Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Aidas Bendoraitis

4 (8)

Web Development with Django Cookbook

4 (8)

By: Aidas Bendoraitis

Overview of this book

Django is a web framework that was designed to strike a balance between rapid web development and high performance. It has the capacity to handle applications with high levels of user traffic and interaction, and can integrate with massive databases on the backend, constantly collecting and processing data in real time. Through this book, you'll discover that collecting data from different sources and providing it to others in different formats isn't as difficult as you thought. It follows a task-based approach to guide you through all the web development processes using the Django framework. We’ll start by setting up the virtual environment for a Django project and configuring it. Then you’ll learn to write reusable pieces of code for your models and find out how to manage database schema changes using South migrations. After that, we’ll take you through working with forms and views to enter and list data. With practical examples on using templates and JavaScript together, you will discover how to create the best user experience. In the final chapters, you'll be introduced to some programming and debugging tricks and finally, you will be shown how to test and deploy the project to a remote dedicated server. By the end of this book, you will have a good understanding of the new features added to Django 1.8 and be an expert at web development processes.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Getting Started with Django 1.8

1. Getting Started with Django 1.8

Introduction

Working with a virtual environment

Creating a project file structure

Handling project dependencies with pip

Making your code compatible with both Python 2.7 and Python 3

Including external dependencies in your project

Configuring settings for development, testing, staging, and production environments

Defining relative paths in the settings

Creating and including local settings

Setting up STATIC_URL dynamically for Subversion users

Setting up STATIC_URL dynamically for Git users

Setting UTF-8 as the default encoding for MySQL configuration

Setting the Subversion ignore property

Creating the Git ignore file

Deleting Python-compiled files

Respecting the import order in Python files

Creating app configuration

Defining overwritable app settings

2. Database Structure

2. Database Structure

Introduction

Using model mixins

Creating a model mixin with URL-related methods

Creating a model mixin to handle creation and modification dates

Creating a model mixin to take care of meta tags

Creating a model mixin to handle generic relations

Handling multilingual fields

Using migrations

Switching from South migrations to Django migrations

Changing a foreign key to the many-to-many field

3. Forms and Views

3. Forms and Views

Introduction

Passing HttpRequest to the form

Utilizing the save method of the form

Uploading images

Creating a form layout with django-crispy-forms

Downloading authorized files

Filtering object lists

Managing paginated lists

Composing class-based views

Generating PDF documents

Implementing a multilingual search with Haystack

4. Templates and JavaScript

4. Templates and JavaScript

Introduction

Arranging the base.html template

Including JavaScript settings

Using HTML5 data attributes

Opening object details in a modal dialog

Implementing a continuous scroll

Implementing the Like widget

Uploading images by Ajax

5. Custom Template Filters and Tags

5. Custom Template Filters and Tags

Introduction

Following conventions for your own template filters and tags

Creating a template filter to show how many days have passed since a post was published

Creating a template filter to extract the first media object

Creating a template filter to humanize URLs

Creating a template tag to include a template if it exists

Creating a template tag to load a QuerySet in a template

Creating a template tag to parse content as a template

Creating a template tag to modify request query parameters

6. Model Administration

6. Model Administration

Introduction

Customizing columns on the change list page

Creating admin actions

Developing change list filters

Customizing default admin settings

Inserting a map into a change form

7. Django CMS

7. Django CMS

Introduction

Creating templates for Django CMS

Structuring the page menu

Converting an app to a CMS app

Attaching your own navigation

Writing your own CMS plugin

Adding new fields to the CMS page

8. Hierarchical Structures

8. Hierarchical Structures

Introduction

Creating hierarchical categories

Creating a category administration interface with django-mptt-admin

Creating a category administration interface with django-mptt-tree-editor

Rendering categories in a template

Using a single selection field to choose a category in forms

Using a checkbox list to choose multiple categories in forms

9. Data Import and Export

9. Data Import and Export

Introduction

Importing data from a local CSV file

Importing data from a local Excel file

Importing data from an external JSON file

Importing data from an external XML file

Creating filterable RSS feeds

Using Tastypie to create API

Using Django REST framework to create API

10. Bells and Whistles

10. Bells and Whistles

Introduction

Using the Django shell

Using database query expressions

Monkey-patching the slugify() function for better internationalization support

Toggling the Debug Toolbar

Using ThreadLocalMiddleware

Caching the method return value

Using Memcached to cache Django views

Using signals to notify administrators about new entries

Checking for missing settings

11. Testing and Deployment

11. Testing and Deployment

Introduction

Testing pages with Selenium

Testing views with mock

Testing API created using Django REST framework

Releasing a reusable Django app

Getting detailed error reporting via e-mail

Deploying on Apache with mod_wsgi

Setting up cron jobs for regular tasks

Creating and using the Fabric deployment script

Index

Index

Creating and including local settings

Configuration doesn't necessarily need to be complex. If you want to keep things simple, you can work with two settings files: settings.py for common configuration and local_settings.py for sensitive settings that shouldn't be under version control.

Getting ready

Most of the settings for different environments will be shared and saved in version control. However, there will be some settings that are specific to the environment of the project instance, for example, database or e-mail settings. We will put them in the local_settings.py file.

How to do it…

To use local settings in your project, perform the following steps:

At the end of settings.py, add a version of local_settings.py that claims to be in the same directory, as follows:

# settings.py
# … put this at the end of the file …
try:
    execfile(os.path.join(
        os.path.dirname(__file__), "local_settings.py"
    ))
except IOError:
    pass

Create local_settings.py and put your environment-specific settings there, as shown in the following:

# local_settings.py
DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.mysql",
        "NAME": "myproject",
        "USER": "root",
        "PASSWORD": "root",
    }
}

EMAIL_BACKEND = \
    "django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend"

INSTALLED_APPS += (
    "debug_toolbar",
)

How it works…

As you can see, the local settings are not normally imported, they are rather included and executed in the settings.py file itself. This allows you to not only create or overwrite the existing settings, but also adjust the tuples or lists from the settings.py file. For example, we add debug_toolbar to INSTALLED_APPS here in order to be able to debug the SQL queries, template context variables, and so on.

See also

The Creating a project file structure recipe
The Toggling the Debug Toolbar recipe in Chapter 10, Bells and Whistles

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