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)

Sessions and Authentication

So far, we have used Django to develop dynamic applications that allow users to interact with application models, but we have not attempted to secure these applications from unwanted use. For example, our Bookr app allows unauthenticated users to add reviews and upload media. This is a critical security issue for any online web app as it leaves the site open to the posting of spam or other inappropriate material and the vandalism of existing content. We want the creation and modification of content to be strictly limited to authenticated users who have registered with the site.

The authentication app supplies Django with the models for representing users, groups, and permissions. It also provides middleware, utility functions, decorators, and mixins that help us integrate user authentication into our apps. Furthermore, the authentication app allows us to group and name certain sets of users.

In Chapter 4, Introduction to Django Admin, we used the...