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

URLs and views: creating the main page


The first thing that comes to mind after seeing the welcome page of the development server is: How can we change it? To create our own welcome page, we need to define an entry point to our application in the form of a URL and tell Django to call a particular Python function when a visitor accesses this URL. We will write this Python function ourselves, and make it display our own welcome message.

Creating the main page view

A view in Django terminology is a regular Python function that responds to a page request by generating the corresponding page. To write our first Django view for the main page, we first need to create a Django application inside our project. You can think of an application as a container for views and data models. To create it, issue the following command within our django_bookmarks folder:

$ python manage.py startapp bookmarks

The syntax of application creation is very similar to that of project creation. We used startapp as the...