This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
Of course, we could continue adding features to our blog engine forever (many people do!), but hopefully you’ve seen enough to give you a taste of the power of Django. In the course of building this skeletal blog app you’ve seen a number of Django’s elegant, labor-saving features:
- The built-in Web server, which makes your development work more self-contained and automatically reloads your code if you edit it
- The pure-Python approach to data model creation, which saves you from having to write or maintain SQL code or XML description files
- The automatic admin application, which provides full-fledged content-editing features even for nontechnical users
- The template system, which can be used to produce HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any textual output format
- Template filters, which can alter the presentation of your data (such as dates) without messing with your application’s business logic
- The URLconf system, which gives you great flexibility in URL design while keeping application-specific portions of URLs in the application, where they belong
Just to give you an idea of what’s ahead, the following are some things we could proceed to do to our blog using Django’s built-in features:
- Publish Atom or RSS feeds of our latest posts (see Chapter 11)
- Add a search feature so that users can locate blog posts containing specific terms (see the CMS example app in Chapter 8, “Content Management System”)
- Adopt Django’s “generic views” to avoid having to write any code in views.py at all (see the Pastebin example app in Chapter 10, “Pastebin”)
You’ve completed your whirlwind tour of Django basics. Chapter 3, fleshes out with a broad look at Django’s key components and the philosophies behind them, as well as provides a recap of some Web development principles central not only to Django itself, but to the lessons we offer in later parts of the book. Chapter 4, takes you down into the details of the framework, where you find answers to the questions of “how, why, and what about ...?” that probably arose as you walked through the previous examples. After Chapter 4, you have a solid enough understanding to follow along and build several example applications: a content management system, a pastebin, a photo gallery, and an Ajax-powered “live blog.”