Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Aidas Bendoraitis

Buy this Book

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Aidas Bendoraitis

Buy this Book

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.

Web Development with Django Cookbook Second Edition

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Creating a project file structure

A consistent file structure for your projects makes you well-organized and more productive. When you have the basic workflow defined, you can get in the business logic quicker and create awesome projects.

Getting ready

If you haven't done this yet, create a virtualenvs directory, where you will keep all your virtual environments (read about this in the Working with a virtual environment recipe). This can be created under your home directory.

Then, create a directory for your project's environment, for example, myproject_env. Start the virtual environment in it. I would suggest adding the commands directory for local bash scripts that are related to the project, the db_backups directory for database dumps, and the project directory for your Django project. Also, install Django in your virtual environment.

How to do it…

Follow these steps in order to create a file structure for your project:

With the virtual environment activated, go to the project directory and start a new Django project as follows:
```
(myproject_env)$ django-admin.py startproject myproject
```
For clarity, we will rename the newly created directory as django-myproject. This is the directory that you will put under version control, therefore, it will have the .git, .svn, or similar directories.
In the django-myproject directory, create a README.md file to describe your project to the new developers. You can also put the pip requirements with the Django version and include other external dependencies (read about this in the Handling project dependencies with pip recipe). Also, this directory will contain your project's Python package named myproject; Django apps (I recommend having an app called utils for different functionalities that are shared throughout the project); a locale directory for your project translations if it is multilingual; a Fabric deployment script named fabfile.py, as suggested in the Creating and using the Fabric deployment script recipe in Chapter 11, Testing and Deployment; and the externals directory for external dependencies that are included in this project if you decide not to use pip requirements.
In your project's Python package, myproject, create the media directory for project uploads, the site_static directory for project-specific static files, the static directory for collected static files, the tmp directory for the upload procedure, and the templates directory for project templates. Also, the myproject directory should contain your project settings, the settings.py and conf directories (read about this in the Configuring settings for development, testing, staging, and production environments recipe), as well as the urls.py URL configuration.
In your site_static directory, create the site directory as a namespace for site-specific static files. Then, separate the separated static files in directories in it. For instance, scss for Sass files (optional), css for the generated minified Cascading Style Sheets, img for styling images and logos, js for JavaScript, and any third-party module combining all types of files such as the tinymce rich-text editor. Besides the site directory, the site_static directory might also contain overwritten static directories of third-party apps, for example, cms overwriting static files from Django CMS. To generate the CSS files from Sass and minify the JavaScript files, you can use the CodeKit or Prepros applications with a graphical user interface.
Put your templates that are separated by the apps in your templates directory. If a template file represents a page (for example, change_item.html or item_list.html), then directly put it in the app's template directory. If the template is included in another template (for example, similar_items.html), put it in the includes subdirectory. Also, your templates directory can contain a directory called utils for globally reusable snippets, such as pagination, language chooser, and others.

How it works…

The whole file structure for a complete project in a virtual environment will look similar to the following:

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Aidas Bendoraitis

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Aidas Bendoraitis

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

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Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

Creating a project file structure

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

See also