Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Introduction

Let's say we want to customize the front page of a large organization's admin site. We want to show the health of the different systems in the organization and see any high-priority alerts that are active. If this were an internal website built on top of Django, we would need to customize it. Adding these kinds of functionalities will require the developers in the IT team to customize the default admin panel and create their own custom AdminSite module, which will render a different index page in comparison to what is provided by the default admin site. Fortunately, Django makes these kinds of customizations easy.

In this chapter, we will look at how we can leverage Django's framework and its extensibility to customize Django's default admin interface (as shown in Figure 10.1). We'll not just learn how to make the interface more personal; we will also learn how we can control the different aspects of the admin site to make Django load a custom...