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

Customizing the Admin Site

Django as a web framework provides a lot of customization options for building web applications. We will be using this same freedom provided by Django when we are working on building the admin application for our project.

In Chapter 4, Introduction to Django Admin, we looked at how we can use the admin.site properties to customize the elements of our Django's admin interface. But what if we require more control over how our admin site behaves? For example, let's say we wanted to use a custom template for the login page (or the logout page) to show to users whenever they visited the Bookr admin panel. In this case, the admin.site properties provided might not be enough, and we will need to build customizations that can extend the default admin site's behavior. Luckily, this can be easily achieved by extending the AdminSite class from Django's admin model. But before we jump into building our admin site, let's first understand how...