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

Chapter 3. Building a Social Bookmarking Application

In the previous chapter we learned how to create an empty project, enter the database settings, and run the development server. Now, we will start writing our bookmark-sharing application and learn about views, models, and templates in the process.

You can think of this chapter as a prolonged tour of the main Django components. You will learn how to create dynamic pages using views, store and manage data in the database using models, and simplify page generation using templates. While learning about these features, you will form a solid idea of how Django components work and interact with each other. The later chapters will explore these components deeper, as we develop more features and add them to our application.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

  • URLs and views: Creating the main page

  • Models: Designing an initial database schema

  • Templates: Creating a template for the main page

  • Putting it all together: Generating user pages...