Before moving on to the next step, which is creating the status page, we should come up with a way to generate some fake data. This will help us while creating the status page and debug any issues that we encounter along the way. Without any data, we could spend time creating the perfect status page, only to find out later when we add data that some aspect of it, such as the design or data layout scheme, won't work.
Django has a very useful feature called management commands. It allows us to create Python scripts that can interact with the rest of the Django app code we write, including our models.
The reason we can't just write a simple Python script that imports our models is that Django, like all web frameworks, has many dependencies and requires a complex setup to make sure that every thing is configured properly before we can use its features. For example, accessing the database depends on Django knowing where the settings file is because...