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

Context Processors and Using MEDIA_URL in Templates

To use MEDIA_URL in a template, we could pass it in through the rendering context dictionary, in our view. For example:

from django.conf import settings
def my_view(request):
    return render(request, "template.html",\
                  {"MEDIA_URL": settings.MEDIA_URL,\
                   "username": "admin"})

This will work, but the problem is that MEDIA_URL is a common variable that we might want to use in many places, and so we'd have to pass it through in practically every view.

Instead, we can use a context processor, which is a way of adding one or more variables automatically to the context dictionary on every render call.

A context processor is a function that accepts...