Django Project Blueprints

Key Features

• Build six exciting projects and use them as a blueprint for your own work
• Extend Django’s built-in models and forms to add common functionalities into your project, without reinventing the wheel
• Gain insights into the inner workings of Django to better leverage it

Book Description

Django is a high-level web framework that eases the creation of complex, database-driven websites. It emphasizes on the reusability and pluggability of components, rapid development, and the principle of don’t repeat yourself. It lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications quickly.

There are several Django tutorials available online, which take as many shortcuts as possible, but leave you wondering how you can adapt them to your own needs. This guide takes the opposite approach by demonstrating how to work around common problems and client requests, without skipping the important details. If you have built a few Django projects and are on the lookout for a guide to get you past the basics and to solve modern development tasks, this is your book.

Seven unique projects will take you through the development process from scratch, leaving no stone unturned. In the first two projects, you will learn everything from adding ranking and voting capabilities to your App to building a multiuser blog platform with a unique twist. The third project tackles APIs with Django and walks us through building a Nagios-inspired infrastructure monitoring system. And that is just the start!

The other projects deal with customizing the Django admin to create a CMS for your clients, translating your web applications to multiple languages, and using the Elasticsearch search server with Django to create a high performing e-commerce web site. The seventh chapter includes a surprise usage of Django, and we dive deep into the internals of Django to create something exciting!

When you’re done, you’ll have consistent patterns and techniques that you can build on for many projects to come.

What you will learn

• Create a blogging platform and allow users to share posts on different blogs
• Prioritise user-submitted content with an intelligent ranking algorithm based on multiple factors
• Create REST APIs to allow non-browser based usage of your web apps
• Customize the Django admin to quickly create a full-featured and rich content management system
• Use Elasticsearch with Django to create blazing fast e-commerce websites
• Translate your Django applications into multiple languages
• Dive deep into Django forms and how they work internally

About the Author

Asad Jibran Ahmed is an experienced programmer who has worked mostly with Django-based web applications for the past 5 years. Based in Dubai, UAE, he has worked with some of the biggest web properties in the region, including Dubizzle, the number one classifieds platform in UAE; Nabbesh, one of the top freelancing platforms in the MENA region; and Just Property, a hot and rising name in the property portal space of the region.

His experience with such big names has given him a keen insight into how to design performant, stable, and user friendly web applications, all the while using programming practices that make sure that the code base is maintainable for years.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Blueblog – a Blogging Platform
Chapter 2: Discuss – a Hacker News Clone
Chapter 3: Djagios – a Nagios Clone in Django
Chapter 4: A Car Rental App
Chapter 5: Multilingual Movie Database
Chapter 6: Daintree – an E-commerce Site
Chapter 7: Form Mason – a Monkey of your own
Appendix: Development Environment Setup Details and Debugging Techniques