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

Summary

In this chapter, we added the MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL settings and a special URL map to serve media files. We then created a form and a view to upload files and save them to the media directory. We saw how to add the media context processor to automatically have access to the MEDIA_URL setting in all our templates. We then enhanced and simplified our form code by using a Django form with a FileField or ImageField, instead of manually defining one in HTML.

We looked at some of the enhancements Django provides for images with the ImageField, and how to interact with an image using Pillow. We showed an example view that would be able to serve files that required authentication, using the FileResponse class. Then, we saw how to store files on models using the FileField and ImageField and refer to them in a template using the FileField.url attribute. We were able to reduce the amount of code we had to write by automatically building a ModelForm from a model instance. Finally...