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

Creating your first project


Now that the software we need is in place, here comes the fun part—creating our first Django project!

As you may recall from the Django installation section, we used a command called django-admin.py to test our installation. This utility is at the heart of Django's project management facilities, as it enables the user to do a range of project management tasks. They include the following:

  • Creating a new project

  • Creating and managing the project's database

  • Validating the current project and testing for errors

  • Starting the development web server

In the rest of this chapter, we will see how to use some of these tasks and create a basis for our bookmark-sharing application in the process.

Creating an empty project

To create your first Django project, open a terminal (or command prompt for Windows users), type the following command, and hit Enter:

$ django-admin.py startproject django_bookmarks

This command will create a folder named django_bookmarks in the current directory...