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Problems with linking to views in Django

I'm in the process of setting up my views in Django, but I'm confused about how to link it to my pageOne.html page so it shows that instead of the "Welcome" page. Currently, when I run the server using python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.2:8001 I get an error message that says "Template Does Not Exist at" pageOne.html.
I've set
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (os.path.join(os.path.dirname(BASE_DIR), "static", "templates"))
I've also tried
TEMPLATE_DIRS = ('/Users/andrewnguyen/Desktop/Websites/gale/python/techExercise/templates',)
but that hasn't really worked either.
Update:
Here's a screenshot. I imagine that my error is somewhere in my urls, settings or views.py. I've changed the path to my TEMPLATE_DIRS as mentioned in the comment below. That did not work. I've included an image of my file structure on Imgur: http://imgur.com/kR1xcGJ

Your TEMPLATE_DIRS settings should look like this:
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "templates"),
)
Update
After looking at that screenshot you posted, I can say you've made a lot of mistakes.
The templates folder is inside the static folder.
Move the templates folder out of the static folder.
There's a mistake in the return statement of your view.
It should look like this:
return render(request, 'pageOne.html')
There's no need to prepend /static/templates/ to the template name. Django automatically looks for templates in your settings' TEMPLATE_DIRS path.
And finally, nothing you're doing is very difficult. All these mistakes are caused by ignorance, since everything is mentioned elaborately in the docs. Please read them carefully.

Minimal developer setup of sorl-thumbnail with Django 1.7

My initial goal is to use sorl-thumbnail in the most basic way to cache on my filesystem cropped images that are downloaded from external sites. I don't care about performance at the moment and don't want to yet setup extra systems (memcachedb, redis). I am using the development runserver.
On the one hand the docs make it sound like I must use one of these two options. I feel like other places I have read that it can be setup to not require these KV stores. As one evidence for that, I see the setting sorl.thumbnail.kvstores.dbm_kvstore.KVStore in the reference docs (which says A simple Key Value Store has no dependencies outside the standard Python library and uses the DBM modules to store the data.), but I cannot get that to work either (see below).
Using Python 2.7.5, Django 1.7.1, Pillow 2.6.1, and sorl-thumbnail 12.1c.
Added sorl.thumbnail as part of my INSTALLED_APPS.
Added to settings.py:
THUMBNAIL_DEBUG = True
import logging
from sorl.thumbnail.log import ThumbnailLogHandler
handler = ThumbnailLogHandler()
handler.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
logging.getLogger('sorl.thumbnail').addHandler(handler)
I see no other logging in my web server console despite this.
Attempted to sync my db:
$ ./manage.py migrate thumbnail
Operations to perform:
Apply all migrations: thumbnail
Running migrations:
Applying thumbnail.0001_initial... FAKED
No tables appear to be added to my database.
At this point, I've added to my template the load directive and the following snippet, where item.image_url is a models.URLField which works fine apart from thumbnail.
{% thumbnail item.image_url "235x200" crop="center" as im %}
<img src="{{ im.url }}">
{% empty %}
<p>No image</p>
{% endthumbnail %}
When I try to view the page, I see broken image links:
http://127.0.0.1:8001/<myapp>/cache/cf/43/cf43126f1f961593650b5df4791e329f.jpg 404 (NOT FOUND)
My MEDIA_URL is not set, though I tried playing with that to no avail.
I further tried putting into the settings: THUMBNAIL_KVSTORE = 'sorl.thumbnail.kvstores.dbm_kvstore.KVStore' but this gives the DJANGO error in the browser: Error importing module sorl.thumbnail.kvstores.dbm_kvstore: "No module named dbm_kvstore".
Can I configure it in this way, not requiring memcached, and if so, which of my settings are wrong/missing? If I must use memcached, how many more settings must I configure in addition to its installation? Thanks.
Update
Here are my settings involving static assets.
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = '/tmp/static/'
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
PROJECT_ROOT.child("static"),
)
STATICFILES_FINDERS = (
'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder',
'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder',
#'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.DefaultStorageFinder', If enabled breaks my LESS CSS.
'static_precompiler.finders.StaticPrecompilerFinder',
)
# STATICFILES_STORAGE not set but should default to 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage'
I am already serving some static images from mysite/static/img. And I forgot to mention that I am using the Django Static Precompiler for LESS CSS. My LESS files are at mysite/static/css and are compiled to /tmp/static/COMPILED/.
I see there is a cache dir in my project root mysite, and it does have the file which is trying to be served: cache/6a/a6/6aa6ebf6cef5bf481fd37d4947d25623.jpg.
I've read the documentation on serving static assets but it's unclear to me what settings to change. Seems that I either need to have that jpg produced in a different directory, or add this directory to the list of dirs from which I'm serving static assets. I tried adding this path to STATICFILES_DIRS but that didn't work.

When you go into this directory '/cache/cf/43/', do you actually see the file 'cf43126f1f961593650b5df4791e329f.jpg' in there?
If so, it may be returning a 404 because you are using the Django runserver (not sure if you are or not). If you are, it might be worth taking a look at how to serve media files in development mode, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/howto/static-files/.

You don't need to setup the cache backend initialy, you may need to setup serving the static files, please look at the django docs about serving MEDIA and STATIC resources.
But the most important, Django 1.7 Support was introduced in the 12.1c release.
Try first:
pip install sorl-thumbnail==12.1c
It's also helpful that you set the debug thumbnail setting on your settings file:
THUMBNAIL_DEBUG = True

Both other answers correctly suggested problems with serving up media files. Here is the complete list of code changes that were required:
I had glossed over the fact that MEDIA assets are not the same as STATIC assets. This answer is the one that tipped me off to the fact that sorl-thumbnail is relying on MEDIA_URL to form its URL, and accordingly, MEDIA_ROOT. For my development, I set the following:
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = '/tmp/media/'
I used this snippet for URLconf changes for serving up the media files. At this point I put an image in the media directory and made sure my template could correctly reference it.
By this point, I had manually removed the sorl-thumbnail generated thumbnails, but no permutation of settings and activity would regenerate them. I remembered that getting your key value store/database/cached images out of sync requires manual cleanup. The management command ./manage.py thumbnail cleanup did the job, and it began regenerating again.
Also worth noting is that I did not have to set THUMBNAIL_KVSTORE at all, or setup any key value store.
I hope this helps get others get started faster in setting up their dev environment.

Django static files, and filepaths in settings.py

I'm trying my first proper webdev project and i'm learning the django framework.
I came here to ask about the cleanest way to use "static files", like the external CSS i'm referring to in one of my html templates. I tried reading through the official documentation on the subject but found it a little bit confusing as a beginner, i then tried googling but i noticed that most of the guides or stackoverflow answers differed slightly and i realised i needed a better understanding. Bit cheeky to ask but, could someone explain and summarise the process to me?
For reference, here is my project folder hierarchy. At the moment i'm trying to get the template base.html to use the sylesheet at CSS/base.css:
Also one of the things that keeps throwing me off is the use of absolute filepaths. So far i've managed to get away with just using relative filepaths, which makes more sense to me as the aim is to develop on the django test server then transfer it all onto my own server when i have one. (note: perhaps it's because i have no idea how complicated that transfer process is that i don't understand why absolute filepaths are prefered). What's the issue with using relative filepaths?
I realise that this has sort of become two questions, which is against the rules, but i really think both could be answered together and if i understood one it would probably aid my understanding of the other. Any help would be much appreciated.

Here is a set of code snippets from settings.py i have changed for including static files
import os
import django
DJANGO_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(django.__file__))
SITE_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
Dynamically setting variables for SITE_ROOT directory
DATABASES = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
'NAME': os.path.join(SITE_ROOT,'data.db'),
where the sqlite3 database is stored it needs absolute address
'USER': '',
'PASSWORD': '',
'HOST': '',
'PORT': '',
}
}
STATIC_ROOT = SITE_ROOT
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
store static files here
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
os.path.join(SITE_ROOT,'static'),
)
where the templates are stored
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
os.path.join(SITE_ROOT,'templates'),
)
Now in templates use
{% load static %} --at beginning
<link href="{% static "css/bootstrap.min.css"%}" rel="stylesheet" media="screen">
this is an example showing how to access "css/bootstrap.min.css" in static directory

I'm going to assume you're using Django 1.3 or higher as that allows you to use staticfiles (docs) for static files. Here's the basic idea: each Django website consists of multiple apps (directories) that contain all the files needed for a particular part of the website (i.e., a models.py, views.py, a templates directory and also a static directory). This static directory contains the JavaScript and CSS files (as well as other static files for that app.
When deploying the website, you run the collectstatic command to gather all the static files into one directory. From that directory you then serve the static files to visitors of your site (i.e, Apache or a different web server can do that for you).
So the general structure of your web project could be:
manage.py
website/models.py
website/views.py
website/static/website/css/base.css
website/static/website/js/base.js
website/templates/website/base.html
static
settings.py
urls.py
You'll notice that the name of the Django app is repeated in the subdirectories of the static and templates directories. This is necessary because it keeps the files apart when they are moved to a general static directory. In the above example, the STATIC_ROOT is the top-level static directory and into this directory all your static files will be copied.
It's definitely worth reading the documentation of staticfiles as this project layout allows you to reuse Django apps in other projects with ease. For example, you can imagine a website that looks like this:
blog/models.py
blog/templates/blog/overview.html
blog/templates/blog/post.html
blog/urls.py
blog/views.py
photos/models.py
photos/templates/photos/overview.html
photos/templates/photos/photo.html
photos/urls.py
photos/views.py
manage.py
static
settings.py
urls.py
The apps blog and photos can now easily be reused in other websites if desired.

Really appreciate the time put into the #Simeon Visser's answer, and there was some really useful information there but it wasn't entirely what I was looking for. So I asked around and have sinister_user_name from reddit to thank for this, which I thought might help someone else:
Static files have changed a fair bit in recent releases so old blogs might be a bit of a mess.
I'll give it a shot:
In your templates you can use the static_url tag and django will fill in the path for you.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ STATIC_URL }}css/bootstrap.min.css">
It fills in the static url by looking at your settings file. STATIC_URL defaults to /static/ I think in settings? If static files end up in a weird url on your corporate web server you can just change it in settings anyway and it will reflect in all templates. So it doesn't matter if they are absolute.
When you go to deploy you fill in STATIC_ROOT in your settings, this is just the path that you've set your webserver to find the static files. Then if you run manage.py collectstatic and it will copy them to that directory. That's the only function of STATIC_ROOT I think.
I keep the template directory separate from my static directory, mainly because you want your webserver just to serve static files, while templates are processed by python. So, static files are almost not part of your application as far as the web server views them. I keep my templates and static files in separate paths just in the base directory, mainly because both are not python source files.
So my project structure would be like:
manage.py
website/settings.py
app/models.py
app/views.py
templates/base.html
static/js/jquery.js
static/css/bootstrap.css
The problem with relative paths is that they will need to change if your url scheme changes.
Optional: I found in this blog which helps to not put absolute file system paths into the settings.py which is good if your working from multiple machines eg work and home :(
With the slightly different layout for 1.4 I use this at the top of my settings:
import os
import django
import manage
DJANGO_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(django.__file__))
SITE_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(manage.__file__))
instead of what they suggest (the location of settings has moved in 1.4 or 1.3) so SITE_ROOT is messed up. I think that might work.
Further on down in the settings I use this:
# Additional locations of static files
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
os.path.join(SITE_ROOT, 'static'),
)
This will tell the development server where to find the static files. You can do the same for templates or just use the full file path.

How to use the default template for Django admin?

I installed Django and enabled the admin site. When I go to the admin page, I get the following
The image does not look the official Django tutorial. In settings.py I updated TEMPLATE_DIRS with the correct path.
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
"/var/www/mysite/templates/admin"
)
I also tried restarting Apache many times. Any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong? Thank you.

It's an issued related to static files rather than templates:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/#serving-static-files-in-production

Use the developer tools on your browser to looks at what requests are being made. Most likely some static files like CSS, etc. are not being served up.

Django: new project keeps looking for a settings folder

So I started a new django project on a system that has another project. I use subdomains and mod_wsgi to handle the direction to the various projects. The direction seems to be working just fine.
For some reason, though, this second project is insist my urls.py and settings.py files should be located at settings/urls.py and settings/settings.py. Any ideas? It completely ignores the perfectly valid urls.py file that's sitting there (with a couple of filters as test urls). It also ignores any urls.py files I actually put at settings/urls.py (as a test). I made ROOT_URLCONF='urls' as opposed to ROOT_URLCONF='projectname.urls' as django never seems to like the former.
Anyway, I'm completely stumped, and after a couple of hours searching through everything, I can't for the life of me figure out where I should even look. Any ideas?

First, I think your problem might actually be that you have ROOT_URLCONF set to urls instead of <proj_name>.urls so it is searching for settings.urls.py because your ROOT_URLCONF tells it to go to urls.py which would be settings.urls.py while in the settings module.
Second, in your wsgi file, do you have the following line:
s.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'settings'