I know python and have just read a basic intro of django. I have to built something like a travel website with real time updates. Will django be sufficent for this? Somebody advised me to look at django-CMS, I couldn't find a very beginner's tutorial there. Should I opt for django-CMS? Also how much of django should i know before i can try out django-cms?
Edit: Not too much real time stuff but just updates on the fly, like availibilty etc. Do i really need CMS?
Thanks
From your brief description it sounds like the main part of you project will be something that manages travel information and displays it to visitors to a website. This definitely sounds like something Django would be perfect for.
Django projects tend to be very modular, so the content management part of you code would likely be completely distinct from the travel parts of your project. Personally I'd start with the core travel functionality, rather than start out with worrying about content management. Then once you have that in place you'll be better positioned to decide whether django-cms fits your content needs, or whether something hand rolled will do.
Start by defining your models for the travel application. Then register those models with the admin. Get happy with how the data is modelled and then try and create one of the basic views. You should have something up and running pretty quickly.
You might also be interested in the GeoDjango project http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/GeoDjango which provides lots of geographical and mapping tools - which sounds pretty relevant to your project.
I would say no. Django CMS is well designed, if you change content frequently. It has nice features to build up a page. But that means it only shows its benefits, when you create a lot pages/subpages and so on.
For a simple website that only presents data, without adding new pages/views, Django will suffice.
And from my experience, you should at lest be familiar with Views and URLs in order to use Django CMS well. But the same applies to Django itself. Everything else can be found on google.
Hope that helps.
Related
I am reading Django documentation (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/contrib/contenttypes/#module-django.contrib.contenttypes).
I did not understand content type app, the Django docs describe it as below
Django includes a contenttypes application that can track all of the models installed in your Django-powered project, providing a high-level, generic interface for working with your models.
Can someone explain this from beginner perspective ?
I have experience in developing websites in Django but never touched in this app.
Example: you want to make user-related logging, something like an audit module in user profile. You have dozen of models that could be logged. User, Order, Task, Product, etc.
So your main model will be something like AuditEntity.
How to make it general for all possible current (and future models) that could be logged here? Which type of field do you need?
The answer is Django contenttypes.
If you want - try to implement such a model's structure to understand how it works.
I think that what is trying to tell you is that you can have different content (in blocks, as it is organized in "blocks" and it is very "module friendly", I hope to give the idea), this content is made up of different things, especially models, let's just say that they are like big classes of things needed in your application (don't judge this expression, I know it is not professional but is the more beginner friendly I can write now), hope this makes more clear!
I am currently developing my first more complex Web Application and want to ask for directions from more experienced Developers.
First I want to explain the most important requirements.
I want to develop a Web App (no mobile apps or desktop apps) and want to use as much django as possible. Because I am comfortable with the ecosystem right now and don't have that much time to learn something new that is too complex. I am inexperienced in the Javascript World, but I am able to do a little bit of jQuery.
The idea is to have one database and many different Frontends that are branded differently and have different users and administrators. So my current approach is to develop a Backend with Django and use Django Rest Framework to give the specific data to the Frontends via REST. Because I have not that much time to learn a Frontend-Framework I wanted to use another Django instance to use as a Frontend, as I really like the Django Template language. This would mean one Django instance one Frontend, where there would be mainly TemplateViews. The Frontends will be served on different subdomains, while the backend exposes the API Endpoints on the top level domain.
It is not necessary to have a Single Page App. A Normal Website with mainly the normal request/response-cycle is fine.
Do you think this is a possible approach to do things? I am currently thinking about how to use the data in the frontend sites in the best way. As I am familiar with the Django template language I thought about writing a middleware that asks about the user details in every request cycle from the backend. The thought is to use a request.user as normally as possible while getting the data from the backend.
Or is ist better to ask these details via jQuery and Ajax Calls and don't use the django template language very much?
Maybe there is also a way to make different Frontends for the same database without using REST?
Or what would you think about using a database with each frontend, which changes everytime I make a change in the main database in the backend? Although I don't really like this approach due to the possibility of differences in data if I make a mistake.
Hopefully this is not to confusing for you. If there are questions I will answer them happily. Maybe I am also totally on the wrong track. Please don't hesitate to point that out, too.
I thank you very much in advance for your guiding and wish you a nice day.
as per my experience and knowledge, you are almost going towards correct direction.
my recommendation is for making backend rest api Django and django rest framework is the best option however for consuming those api you can look for the angular or react both works very well in terms of consuming API.
Thank you for your input om tripathi.
I think it really does make sense to use the modern js frameworks for consuming a REST API.
I looked a little further into my problem and found multitenancy to fit my requirements perfectly. There are also great plugins and good reads for that use case. Just for others some informations I stumbled upon:
https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/multi-tenancy/
https://www.vinta.com.br/blog/2017/multitenancy-juggling-customer-data-django/
Especially the second link gave me information about different design approaches. For myself I chose to go the way with one database for every Client and then using the site framework from django to seperate data. For the Subdomain resolving I use django-hosts.
Thank you again and have a nice day.
I have been facing a big challenge with django since I was assigned the task to rebuild the admin page of our platform. I started unsure of what to do and now that I am half way on, I am even more unsure.
Here is my question:
If I want to build a highly customized admin, should I do a giant hack on the source code or create a new app?
1) Giant Hack
That is how I started and got stuck. A couple of problems appeared on the way, for instance:
I had to extend the AdminSite and override every view I wanted to change
Django's admin is very modular (I mean, very very modular) and a screen might be the sum of tons of other templates
Creating a simple navbar is a pain in the ass (at least it has been for a newbie like me). This is due to the fact that app_list (the variable that contains the mapped models to show in admin's first page) not being accessible when other templates rather than base.html are injected. Thus, I would have to create a context processor, replace every TemplateResponse() by render() (technically, since I tried to do it and it didn't work as well)
The problems go on and on. Given my lack of experience with django, I might be doing crap, but it does feel like I am on the wrong way.
this guy's answer motivated me to post this.
2) Building a brand new app
Of course it will take a little while to implement this, but it seems like a robust and maintainable way of getting it done. One of the points is that I will need to give the same flexibility as the default admin site gives when adding models and promptly having their cruds and tables (I am not really sure how to accomplish this behavior).
I am pretty new to django and any guidelines will be highly appreciated. Give me your thoughts on how to make it.
There is no need to overwrite admin views. The easiest way is to overwrite the templates and add your own css & javascripts.
I have added my own navbar, sidebars and bottom. It is really easy if you overwrite the admin base templates.
If needed you can provide custom data to the template by using own templatetags.
Is anyone aware of a Django app for designing and storing flowcharts in a database? After searching for variations of "Django flowcharts", I've only found flowcharts of Django's internal design, not anything about authoring or storing flowcharts in a Django webapp.
As asked in a similar question, I've found several impressive Javascript and JQuery based libraries for browser-based flowchart design, but nothing for persisting these server-side.
I wrote an app that stores and controls state machines in Django 1.2:
https://bitbucket.org/canassa/zinaflow
It uses a per-object permission model for controlling the transitions and GenericForeignKeys for attaching the state machine to any model in your application. With the per-object permissions you can assign a Django user for each transition.
Depending on what you need to do, this app might be a overkill for you. But reading the source code can give you some ideias on how to implement an app yourself.
Why couldn't you do it yourself? The behavior and presentation is already implemented in the several truly impressive JavaScript libraries you've referenced, now all that's left to be done is to store the models in the database for your favorite pick you'd like to persist through Django.
There is a library that implements Modified Preorder Tree Traversal on the model level that I'm sure would be of great use to you to store the logical relations between the flowchart elements and other presentation data, such as the coordinates, shape, it's transformations and other visual properties can be easily stored alongside.
I'm sure that if you'd give it some thought you could quickly execute it; hell it's even probable that there are many people who need the same thing, which would make it even more useful if you weren't developing it just for yourself. This seems like a good candidate for an OS Django app.
I am not aware of an existing app that does this, but if you want to start developing your own a good place to start would be exploring the code for GraphModels, a command from the excellent django-command-extensions project. It is a django manage.py extension that creates database diagrams from models using graphviz.
I just wanted to try to build a project with django. Therefore I have a (basic) question on how to manage such a project. Since I cannot find any guidelines or so on how to split a project into applications.
Let's take a kind of SO as an example. Which applications would you use?
I'd say there should be the applications "users" and "questions". But what if there was a topic system with static articles, too. Maybe they also could receive votes.
How to build the apps structure then? One app for "questions", "votes" and "topics" or just one app "content"?
I have no idea what to do. Maybe it's because I know not very much about Django yet, but I'm interested either...
There aren't hard-and-fast rules, but I would say it's better to err on the side of more specialized applications. Ideally an application should handle just one functional concern: i.e. "tagging" or "commenting" or "auth/auth" or "posts." This type of design will also help you reuse available open source applications instead of reinventing the wheel (i.e. Django comes with auth and comments apps, django-tagging or django-taggable can almost certainly do what you need, etc).
Generic foreign keys can help you decouple applications such as tagging or commenting that might be applied to models from several other applications.
You should try and separate the project in as much applications as possible. For most projects an application will not contain more than 5 models. For example a project like SO would have separate applications for UsersProfiles, Questions, Tags (there's a ready one in django for this), etc. If there was a system with static pages that'd be a separate application too (there are ready ones for this purpose). You should also try and make your applications as generic as possible, so you may reuse them in other projects. There's a good presentation on reusable apps.
Just like any set of dependencies... try to find the most useful stand-alone aspects of the project and make those stand-alone apps. Other Django Apps will have higher level functionality, and reuse the parts of the lowest level apps that you have set up.
In my project, I have a calendar app with its own Event object in its models. I also have a carpool database set up, and for the departure time and the duration I use the calendar's Event object right in my RideShare tables. The carpooling database is calendar-aware, and gets all the nice .ics export and calendar views from the calendar app for 'free.'
There are some tricks to getting the Apps reusable, like naming the templates directory: project/app2/templates/app2/index.html. This lets you refer to app2/index.html from any other app, and get the right template. I picked that one up looking at the built-in reusable apps in Django itself. Pinax is a bit of a monster size-wise but it also demonstrates a nice reusable App structure.
If in doubt, forget about reusable apps for now. Put all your messages and polls in one app and get through one rev. You'll discover during the process what steps feel unnecessary, and could be broken out as something stand-alone in the future.
A good question to ask yourself when deciding whether or not to write an app is "could I use this in another project?". If you think you could, then consider what it would take to make the application as independent as possible; How can you reduce the dependancies so that the app doesn't rely on anything specific to a particular project.
Some of the ways you can do this are:
Giving each app its own urls.py
Allowing model types to be passed in as parameters rather than explicitly declaring what models are used in your views. Generic views use this principle.
Make your templates easily overridden by having some sort of template_name parameter passed in your urls.py
Make sure you can do reverse url lookups with your objects and views. This means naming your views in the urls.py and creating get_absolute_url methods on your models.
In some cases like Tagging, GenericForeignKeys can be used to associate a model in your app to any other model, regardless of whether it has ForeignKeys "looking back" at it.
I'll tell you how I am approaching such question: I usually sit with a sheet of paper and draw the boxes (functionalities) and arrows (interdependencies between functionalities). I am sure there are methodologies or other things that could help you, but my approach usually works for me (YMMV, of course).
Knowing what a site is supposed to be is basic, though. ;)