Django Unleashed

About

Features

• Teaches Django's core features and contributed library by programming, securing, and deploying a full-featured website
• Covesrs Models, Managers, Views, URL Patterns, and Templates
• Shows common web patterns students can utilize with virtually any content management framework

Description

Django is an amazingly powerful system for creating modern, dynamic websites. But programming Django hasn’t always been easy–until now. Django Unleashed is your step-by-step, beginner-friendly guide to leveraging Django’s core capabilities and its powerful contributed library. You’ll learn in the most effective way possible: hands on, by building a fully functional Django website from scratch. You’ll even deploy the website to the cloud.

As you build your website, expert Django consultant and trainer Andrew Pinkham reveals how websites operate; how Django makes building websites easy; how to write Python code that leverages its immense capabilities; and how to build solutions that are robust, reliable, and secure. You’ll start simply and learn to solve increasingly challenging problems: mastering new features and understanding how Django’s architecture shapes their behavior, and gaining essential knowledge for working with any web framework, not just Django.

Drawing on his extensive experience teaching Django, Pinkham answers the key questions beginners ask most often. And as you gain experience, you’ll learn advanced techniques for enhancing site functionality and performance, strengthening security, promoting code reuse, and much more.

Detailed information on how to...

• Quickly start a new Django project and establish a strong foundation for a growing site
• Define how your data is organized and create a SQLite database to manage it
• Quickly produce HTML with Django templates
• Create dynamic webpages with Django’s URL patterns and views, including function views, class-based views, and generic views
• Enable efficient, reliable data input with Django Forms and custom form validations
• Understand the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, compare it to Model-Template-Views, and gain a holistic understanding of Django’s structure
• Write as little code as possible, simplify code reuse, and mitigate software decay by adhering to the Don’t Repeat Yourself paradigm.
• Dive into Django source code to troubleshoot problems
• Extend site functionality with Django’s contributed library
• Protect your site with user authentication and permissions
• Avoid security pitfalls such as SQL Injection, XSS, and CSRF
• Optimize site performance
• Deploy your site to a managed cloud service and to a PostgreSQL database

Extras

Author's Site

Please visit the author's site here.

Companion Site

Please visit the website associated with Django Unleashed at here.

Sample Content

Sample Pages

Download the sample pages (includes Chapter 1 and 5 and Index)

Table of Contents

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

About the Author xix

Part I: Django’s Core Features 1

Chapter 1: Starting a New Django Project: Building a Startup Categorizer with Blog 3

1.1 Introduction 3

1.2 Website Basics 4

1.3 Understanding Modern Websites 5

1.4 Building Modern Websites: The Problems That Frameworks Solve and Their Caveats 6

1.5 Django: Python Web Framework 8

1.6 Defining the Project in Part I 11

1.7 Creating a New Django Project and Django Apps 13

1.8 Putting It All Together 21

Chapter 2: Hello World: Building a Basic Webpage in Django 23

2.1 Introduction 23

2.2 Creating and Integrating a New App 24

2.3 Building Hello World 25

2.4 Displaying Hello World 26

2.5 Controller Limitations: The Advantages of Models and Views 27

2.6 Removing Our Helloworld App from Our Project 27

2.7 Putting It All Together 29

Chapter 3: Programming Django Models and Creating a SQLite Database 31

3.1 Introduction 31

3.2 Why Use a Database? 32

3.3 Organizing Our Data 32

3.4 Specifying and Organizing Data in Django Using Models 36

3.5 Using Django to Automatically Create a SQLite Database with manage.py 49

3.6 Manipulating Data in the Database: Managers and QuerySets 56

3.7 String Case Ordering 68

3.8 Putting It All Together 71

Chapter 4: Rapidly Producing Flexible HTML with Django Templates 73

4.1 Introduction 73

4.2 Revisiting Hello World: The Advantages of Templates 74

4.3 Understanding Django Templates and Their Goals 77

4.4 Choosing a Format, an Engine, and a Location for Templates 77

4.5 Building a First Template: A Single Tag Object 78

4.6 Building the Rest of Our App Templates 90

4.7 Using Template Inheritance for Design Consistency 102

4.8 Using Templates in Python with the Template, Context, and loader Classes 112

4.9 Putting It All Together 118

Chapter 5: Creating Webpages with Controllers in Django: Views and URL Configurations 121

5.1 Introduction 121

5.2 The Purpose of Views and URL Configurations 122

5.3 Step-by-Step Examination of Django’s Use of Views and URL Configurations 126

5.4 Building Tag Detail Webpage 128

5.5 Generating 404 Errors for Invalid Queries 132

5.6 Shortening the Development Process with Django View Shortcuts 135

5.7 URL Configuration Internals: Adhering to App Encapsulation 143

5.8 Implementing the Views and URL Configurations to the Rest of the Site 148

5.9 Class-Based Views 155

5.10 Redirecting the Homepage 163

5.11 Putting It All Together 166

Chapter 6: Integrating Models, Templates, Views, and URL Configurations to Create Links between Webpages 169

6.1 Introduction 169

6.2 Generating URLs in Python and Django Templates 170

6.3 Using the url Template Tag to Build a Navigation Menu 175

6.4 Linking List Pages to Detail Pages 177

6.5 Creating Links on the Object Detail Pages 184

6.6 Revisiting Homepage Redirection 186

6.7 Putting It All Together 187

Chapter 7: Allowing User Input with Forms 189

7.1 Introduction 189

7.2 Django Forms as State Machines 190

7.3 Creating TagForm, a Form for Tag Objects 190

7.4 Building the Forms for Startup, Newslink, and Post Models 206

7.5 Putting It All Together 210

Chapter 8: Displaying Forms in Templates 211

8.1 Introduction 211

8.2 Creating a New Template to Create Tag Objects 211

8.3 Creating a New Template to Update Tag Objects 224

8.4 Creating a New Template to Delete Tag Objects 226

8.5 Creating Templates for StartupForm, NewsLinkForm, and PostForm 227

8.6 Reconsidering Template Inheritance 229

8.7 Putting It All Together 231

Chapter 9: Controlling Forms in Views 233

9.1 Introduction 233

9.2 Webpages for Creating Objects 233

9.3 Webpages for Updating Objects 256

9.4 Webpages for Deleting Objects 268

9.5 Putting It All Together 276

Chapter 10: Revisiting Migrations 279

10.1 Introduction 279

10.2 Last Week’s Episode (Reviewing Chapter 3) 279

10.3 Data Migrations 280

10.4 Schema Migrations 288

10.5 Putting It All Together 296

Chapter 11: Bending the Rules: The Contact Us Webpage 299

11.1 Introduction 299

11.2 Creating a contact App 300

11.3 Creating the Contact Webpage 301

11.4 Splitting Organizer urls.py 308

11.5 Putting It All Together 310

Chapter 12: The Big Picture 313

12.1 Introduction 313

12.2 Django’s Core 313

12.3 Webpages with Views and URL Configurations 316

12.4 Generating Webpages Thanks to Models and Templates 317

12.5 Interacting with Data via Forms 318

12.6 Intervening in Control Flow 319

12.7 Moving Forward 319

Part II: Djangos Contributed Libraries 321

Chapter 13: Django’s Contributed Library 323

13.1 Introduction 323

13.2 Django’s Source Code (and Versioning) 323

13.3 Django’s contrib Code 325

13.4 Content (Not) Covered 327

13.5 Translation 328

13.6 Putting It All Together 329

Chapter 14: Pagination: A Tool for Navigation 331

14.1 Introduction 331

14.2 A Word about URLs: Query versus Path 332

14.3 Discovering Django Pagination in the Shell 333

14.4 Paginating the Startup List Webpage 337

14.5 Pagination of Tag List Webpage Using the URL Path 345

14.6 Putting It All Together 351

Chapter 15: Creating Webpages with Django Flatpages 353

15.1 Introduction 353

15.2 Enabling Flatpages 353

15.3 Anatomy of the App 355

15.4 Building an About Webpage 355

15.5 Linking to FlatPage Objects 363

15.6 Security Implications of FlatPages 363

15.7 Migrations for Sites and Flatpages 365

15.8 Putting It All Together 371

Chapter 16: Serving Static Content with Django 373

16.1 Introduction 373

16.2 Adding Static Content for Apps 374

16.3 Adding Static Content for the Project 376

16.4 Integrating Real CSS Content 377

16.5 Putting It All Together 381

Chapter 17: Understanding Generic Class-Based Views 383

17.1 Introduction 383

17.2 Building Generic Object Detail Pages 384

17.3 Why Use Classes for Generic Views? 393

17.4 Building Generic Object Create Pages 394

17.5 Replacing CBVs with GCBVs 395

17.6 Forgoing GCBVs 400

17.7 Adding Behavior with GCBV 401

17.8 Putting It All Together 416

Chapter 18: Advanced Generic Class-Based View Usage 417

18.1 Introduction 417

18.2 Rapid Review of GCBV 418

18.3 Globally Setting Template Suffix for Update Views 419

18.4 Generating Pagination Links 419

18.5 Re-creating PostDetail with DateDetailView 426

18.6 Switching to GCBVs with PostGetMixin in Post Views 429

18.7 Making PostGetMixin Generic 432

18.8 Fixing NewsLink URL Patterns and Form Behavior 438

18.9 Putting It All Together 449

Chapter 19: Basic Authentication 451

19.1 Introduction 451

19.2 Configuring Logging 452

19.3 Sessions and Cookies 456

19.4 auth App Anatomy: The Basics 457

19.5 Adding Login and Logout Features 458

19.6 Putting It All Together 472

Chapter 20: Integrating Permissions 473

20.1 Introduction 473

20.2 Understanding contenttypes and Generic Relations 473

20.3 auth App Anatomy: Permission and Group Models 476

20.4 Protecting Views with Permissions 483

20.5 Conditionally Displaying Template Links 496

20.6 Displaying Future Posts in the Template 497

20.7 Putting It All Together 500

Chapter 21: Extending Authentication 501

21.1 Introduction 501

21.2 auth App Anatomy: Password Views 501

21.3 Changing Passwords 503

21.4 Resetting Passwords 506

21.5 Disabling Accounts 513

21.6 Creating Accounts 517

21.7 URL Cleanup 544

21.8 Anatomy of the App: Full Dissection 545

21.9 Putting It All Together 547

Chapter 22: Overriding Django’s Authentication with a Custom User 549

22.1 Introduction 549

22.2 Creating a User Profile 550

22.3 Custom User 558

22.4 Data Migrations 568

22.5 Adding an Author to Blog Posts 572

22.6 Putting It All Together 576

Chapter 23: The Admin Library 577

23.1 Introduction 577

23.2 A First Look 577

23.3 Modifying the Admin Controls for Blog Posts 581

23.4 Configuring the Admin for the User Model 593

23.5 Creating Admin Actions 616

23.6 Putting It All Together 618

Part III: Advanced Core Features 619

Chapter 24: Creating Custom Managers and Querysets 621

24.1 Introduction to Part III 621

24.2 Introduction to Chapter 24 621

24.3 Custom Managers and Querysets 622

24.4 Fixtures 624

24.5 Management Commands 627

24.6 Putting It All Together 648

Chapter 25: Handling Behavior with Signals 649

25.1 Introduction 649

25.2 Apps and AppConfig 650

25.3 Signals 652

25.4 Putting It All Together 660

Chapter 26: Optimizing Our Site for Speed 661

26.1 Introduction 661

26.2 Profiling 662

26.3 Limiting Database Queries 663

26.4 Changing Database Behavior Internally 679

26.5 Changing Performance Globally 681

26.6 Putting It All Together 685

Chapter 27: Building Custom Template Tags 687

27.1 Introduction 687

27.2 Custom Template Filters 688

27.3 Custom Template Tags 690

27.4 Putting It All Together 706

Chapter 28: Adding RSS and Atom Feeds and a Sitemap 707

28.1 Introduction 707

28.2 RSS and Atom Feeds 707

28.3 Sitemaps 715

28.4 Putting It All Together 724

Chapter 29: Deploy! 725

29.1 Introduction: Understanding Modern Deployments 725

29.2 Preparing for Deployment 726

29.3 Deploying to Heroku 738

29.4 Adding Backing Services 741

29.5 Putting It All Together 748

Chapter 30: Starting a New Project Correctly 749

30.1 Introduction 749

30.2 Preparing a Project 749

30.3 Building the Project 752

30.4 The Road Ahead 754

Part IV: Appendixes 755

Appendix A: HTTP 757

Appendix B: Python Primer 761

Appendix C: Relational Database Basics 765

Appendix D: Security Basics 769

Appendix E: Regular Expressions 771

Appendix F: Compilation Basics 773

Appendix G: Installing Python, Django, and Your Tools 775

Index 779

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