Enhancing Your Blog with Advanced Features

In the preceding chapter, you created a basic blog application. Next, you will turn your application into a fully functional blog with the advanced functionalities that many blogs feature nowadays. You will implement the following features in your blog:

• Sharing posts via email: When readers like an article, they might want to share it with somebody else. You will implement the functionality to share posts via email.
• Adding comments to a post: Many people want to allow their audience to comment on posts and create discussions. You will let your readers add comments to your blog posts.
• Tagging posts: Tags allow you to categorize content in a non-hierarchical manner, using simple keywords. You will implement a tagging system, which is a very popular feature for blogs.
• Recommending similar posts: Once you have a classification method in place, such as a tagging system, you can use it to provide content recommendations to your readers. You will build a system that recommends other posts that share tags with a certain blog post.

These functionalities will turn your application into a fully featured blog.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Sending emails with Django
• Creating forms and handling them in views
• Creating forms from models
• Integrating third-party applications
• Building complex QuerySets