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

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