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

Search engines overview


There has been an explosion of search engine technology available in the open source community in recent years. Many of these have grown out of various academic and commercial projects and most are extremely high quality. We'll discuss a handful of these tools in this section and go on to integrate two of them with Django later in this chapter.

Sphinx

The Sphinx full-text search engine is a free and open source search engine product that has the added benefit of official, paid-support packages. It is available at http://www.sphinxsearch.com/. Sphinx is written in C++ and is available for most UNIX platforms, including Mac OS X. A Windows version is also available, but is officially not recommended for production use. It is fast and has good relevance.

Sphinx includes a search daemon that can be run as a background process on any system. Sphinx also includes API libraries for several popular programming languages, including Python. Sphinx requires you to define your search...