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

Media files refer to extra files that can be added after deployment to enrich your Django application. Usually, they are extra images that you would use in your site, but any type of file (including video, audio, PDF, text, documents, or even HTML) can be served as media.

You can think of them as somewhere between dynamic data and static assets. They are not dynamic data that Django generates on the fly, like when rendering a template. They also are not the static files that are included by the site developer when the site is deployed. Instead, they are extra files that can be uploaded by users or generated by your application for later retrieval.

Some common examples of media files (that you will see in Activity 8.01, Image and PDF Uploads of Books, later in this chapter) are book covers and preview PDFs that can be attached to a Book object. You can also use media files to allow users to upload images for a blog post or avatars for a social media site. If you wanted...