Part I: Creating the Website Framework

HOUR 1 Understanding Django

HOUR 2 Creating Your First Website

HOUR 3 Adding Models and Objects to Your Website

HOUR 4 Creating the Initial Views

Hour 1. Understanding Django

What You'll Learn in This Hour

What the Django framework is, and why you should use it How Django uses models to define data How Django uses Python functions to build views How Django implements templates Where to configure Django projects How to use the manage.py utility What views are available in the admin interface How to install Django

Designing and implementing websites can be fun and rewarding; however, it can also be stressful and demanding. Django is one of the best frameworks available to quickly develop full-featured production websites. Django is flexible and makes it easy to design a website that can be easily updated and expanded. As soon as you have learned the Django framework, you will be able to speed up design, implementation, and maintenance of your websites.

The purpose of this hour is to introduce you to the Django framework and give you a basic understanding of the architecture. The rest of the hours in this book provide the in-depth details you need to implement a full-featured production website using Django.

This hour is a basic overview of the Django framework, including models, views, and templates. We will also cover the utilities that you will use to configure and manage your Django projects. Then we will give you a brief overview of the admin interface that you can use to create and modify objects in your Django projects. Finally, we discuss how to install Django.

What Is Django?

Django is a high-level web framework that simplifies website development. As a high-level web framework, Django abstracts much of the web development process, allowing developers to quickly implement database-backed websites using dynamic web pages.

By dynamic, we mean web pages that are built on-the-fly using data from the browser request, URL, and a database. Dynamic pages solve several different problems. The biggest problem they solve is trying to maintain numerous static pages scattered all over a classic website.

Django implements a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture to separate the data, logic, and view layers in website development. This has two major advantages. One is that it's easy to have some developers develop the database and others develop the web pages. Another is that code and URLs become much cleaner, easier to maintain, and more elegant.