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

The Whoosh search engine


Whoosh is a search engine written entirely in Python. It's slightly easier to install and run than the Sphinx search engine and some would argue it generally feels "more pythonic". To install Whoosh you can simply easy_install Whoosh or visit http://whoosh.ca to get the latest development version.

The fact that Whoosh is pure Python is very convenient for developers who are not interested in or lack knowledge of Java or compiling UNIX software. It can get you up and running quickly and it supports integration with Django, as we'll see shortly.

Just like in Sphinx, Whoosh needs to define and build a set of indexes on our data. The Whoosh documentation is very extensive (another advantage of a pure Python tool) and explains all the indexing options in great detail. We will present a quick tutorial here, before continuing on to using Whoosh with Django.

In Sphinx we defined our indexes using the index section of our sphinx.conf. In Whoosh, they use a Schema object, which...