Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications that stand out from the crowd without spending hours on boilerplate code? You’ve made the right choice trusting the Django framework, and this book will tell you why. Often referred to as a “batteries included” web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django will take you through all the essential concepts and help you explore its power to build real-world applications using Python. Throughout the book, you’ll get the grips with the major features of Django by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you advance, you'll acquire various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. You’ll cover everyday tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this Django book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

STATICFILES_DIRS prefixed mode

As mentioned earlier, the STATICFILES_DIRS setting also accepts items as tuples in the form of (prefix, directory). These modes of operation are not mutually exclusive; STATICFILES_DIRS may contain both non-prefixed (string) or prefixed (tuple) items. Essentially, this allows you to map a certain URL prefix to a directory. In Bookr, we do not have enough static assets to warrant setting this up, but it can be useful if you want to organize your static assets differently. For example, you can keep all your images in a certain directory, and all your CSS in another directory. You might need to do this if you use a third-party CSS generation tool such as Node.js with LESS.

Note

LESS is a CSS pre-processor that uses Node.js. It allows you to write CSS using variables and other programming-like concepts that don’t exist natively. Node.js will then compile this to CSS. A more in-depth explanation is outside the scope of this book; suffice it to...