In order to demonstrate Django's rapid development potential, we will begin by constructing a simple, but fully-featured, e-commerce store. The goal is to be up and running with a product catalog and products for sale, including a simple payment processing interface, in about half-an-hour. If this seems ambitious, remember that Django offers a lot of built-in shortcuts for the most common web-related development tasks. We will be taking full advantage of these and there will be side discussions of their general use.
Before we begin, let's take a moment to check our project setup. In the first chapter we planned a project layout that included two directories: one for files specific to our personal project (settings, URLs, and so on), and the other for our collection of e-commerce Python modules (coleman
). This latter location is where the bulk of the code in the following chapters will live. If you have downloaded the source code from the Packt website...