Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples. Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example. In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.0 Web Site Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface

Generic views


While working with Django, you will notice that there are certain types of views that are always needed regardless of the project you are working on. For this reason, Django comes with a set of views that can be used in any project. These views are known as generic views and we actually used one of them in a previous chapter. Remember the direct_to_template view that renders a template into a page? This view is one example of generic views.

Django offers generic views for the following purposes:

  • Create simple views for tasks such as redirecting to another URL or rendering a template.

  • List view and detail view for displaying objects from a data model. These views are similar to how the admin page displays list and detail pages for the data models.

  • Views to generate date-based archive pages. These can be particularly useful for blogs.

  • Views for creating, editing, and deleting objects in data models.

To use one of these views, you import it from django.views.generic and then map the...