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

User registration


The first user account was added to the database during the creation of our Django project. However, site visitors also need a method to create accounts on the site. User registration is a basic feature found in all social networking sites these days. We will create a user registration form in this section and, in the process, will also learn about the Django library that handles form generation and processing.

Django forms

Creating, validating, and processing forms is a very common task. Web applications receive input and collect data from users by means of web forms. So, naturally, Django comes with its own library to handle these forms. The Django form's library handles three common tasks:

  • HTML form generation

  • Server-side validation of user input

  • HTML form redisplay in case of input errors

This library works in a way which is similar to the working of Django's data models. You start by defining a class that represents your form. This class must be derived from the forms.Form...