Book Image

Django 4 By Example - Fourth Edition

By : Antonio Melé
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Django 4 By Example - Fourth Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Antonio Melé

Overview of this book

Django 4 By Example is the 4th edition of the best-selling franchise that helps you build web apps. This book will walk you through the creation of real-world applications, solving common problems, and implementing best practices using a step-by-step approach. You'll cover a wide range of web app development topics as you build four different apps: A blog application: Create data models, views, and URLs and implement an admin site for your blog. Create sitemaps and RSS feeds and implement a full-text search engine with PostgreSQL. A social website: Implement authentication with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Create user profiles, image thumbnails, a bookmarklet, and an activity stream. Implement a user follower system and add infinite scroll pagination to your website. An e-commerce application: Build a product catalog, a shopping cart, and asynchronous tasks with Celery and RabbitMQ. Process payments with Stripe and manage payment notifications via webhooks. Build a product recommendation engine with Redis. Create PDF invoices and export orders to CSV. An e-learning platform: Create a content management system to manage polymorphic content. Cache content with Memcached and Redis. Build and consume a RESTful API. Implement a real-time chat using WebSockets with ASGI. Create a production environment using NGINX, uWSGI and Daphne with Docker Compose. This is a practical book that will have you creating web apps quickly.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Building a Blog Application

In this book, you will learn how to build professional Django projects. This chapter will teach you how to build a Django application using the main components of the framework. If you haven’t installed Django yet, you will discover how to do so in the first part of this chapter.

Before starting our first Django project, let’s take a moment to see what you will learn. This chapter will give you a general overview of the framework. The chapter will guide you through the different major components to create a fully functional web application: models, templates, views, and URLs. After reading it, you will have a good understanding of how Django works and how the different framework components interact.

In this chapter, you will learn the difference between Django projects and applications, and you will learn the most important Django settings. You will build a simple blog application that allows users to navigate through all published posts and read single posts. You will also create a simple administration interface to manage and publish posts. In the next two chapters, you will extend the blog application with more advanced functionalities.

This chapter should serve as a guide to build a complete Django application and shall provide an insight into how the framework works. Don’t be concerned if you don’t understand all the aspects of the framework. The different framework components will be explored in detail throughout this book.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Installing Python
  • Creating a Python virtual environment
  • Installing Django
  • Creating and configuring a Django project
  • Building a Django application
  • Designing data models
  • Creating and applying model migrations
  • Creating an administration site for your models
  • Working with QuerySets and model managers
  • Building views, templates, and URLs
  • Understanding the Django request/response cycle