Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples. Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example. In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.0 Web Site Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface

Improving the interface with messages


Although our implementation of user networks is working correctly, there is something missing. The interface does not tell the user whether an operation succeeded or failed. After sending an invitation, for example, the user is redirected back to the invitation form, with no feedback on whether the operation was successful or not. In this section, we are going to improve our interface by providing status messages to the user after performing certain actions.

Displaying messages to users is done using the message API, which is part of the authentication system. The API is simple. To create a message, you can use the following call:

request.user.message_set.create(
  message=u'Message text goes here.'
)

This call will create a message and store it in the database. Available messages are accessible from within templates through the variable messages. The following code iterates over messages and displays them in a list:

{% if messages %}
<ul>
    {% for...