Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By : Jesse Legg
Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By: Jesse Legg

Overview of this book

<p>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 provides an excellent basis to build e-commerce websites because it can be deployed fast and it responds quickly to changes due to its ability to handle content problems. Django with its proven strengths is all you need to build powerful e-commerce applications with a competitive edge. <br /><br />This book explores how the Django web framework and its related technologies can power the next leap forward for e-commerce and business on the Web. It shows you how to build real-world applications using this rapid and powerful development tool.<br /><br />The book will enable you to build a high quality e-commerce site quickly and start making money. It starts with the ambitious task of using Django to build a functional e-commerce store in less than 30 minutes, and then proceeds to enhance this design through the rest of the book. The book covers the basics of an e-commerce platform like product catalogs, shopping carts, and payment processing. By the end of the book, you will be able to enhance the application by adding a fully-functional search engine, generating PDF-based reports, adding interactivity to the user-interface, selling digital goods with micropayments, and managing deployment and maintenance tasks.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Django 1.2 e-commerce
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Designing a product catalog


The starting point of our e-commerce application is the product catalog. In the real world, businesses may produce multiple catalogs for mutually exclusive or overlapping subsets of their products. Some examples are: fall and spring catalogs, catalogs based on a genre or sub-category of product such as catalogs for differing kinds of music (for example, rock versus classical), and many other possibilities. In some cases a single catalog may suffice, but allowing for multiple catalogs is a simple enhancement that will add flexibility and robustness to our application.

As an example, we will imagine a fictitious food and beverage company, CranStore.com, that specializes in cranberry products: cranberry drinks, food, and deserts. In addition, to promote tourism at their cranberry bog, they sell numerous gift items, including t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, and the like. We will consider this business to illustrate examples as they relate to the online store we are building...