Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. 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 takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features 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 that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn 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. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Introduction

When developing an app, there is often a need to populate it with data and then alter that data. We have already seen in Chapter 2, Models and Migrations, how this can be done on the command line using the Python manage.py shell. In Chapter 3, URL Mapping, Views, and Templates, we learned how to develop a web form interface to our model using Django's views and templates. But neither of these approaches is ideal for administering the data from the classes in reviews/models.py. Using the shell to manage data is too technical for non-programmers and building individual web pages would be a laborious process as it would see us repeating the same view logic and very similar template features for each table in the model. Fortunately, a solution to this problem was devised in the early days of Django when it was still being developed.

Django admin is actually written as a Django app. It offers an intuitively rendered web interface to give administrative access to the...