Django tutorial mostly ready
When I wrote Installing Django in Mac OS X Leopard I mentioned that I hoped to do a full Django tutorial some day. Well, that day is now. I ran three short one-hour sessions for our development team over the last few weeks, and I think I’ve got a nice tutorial that provides a useful real-world example of what Django can do.
The title of Django: Beyond the SQL is inspired by one of my favorite Django Reinhardt pieces, Beyond the Sea1. You can find it on Djangology. The cover image was also inspired by that tune, and created in Inkscape. The original’s in the resources file.
The tutorial walks you through creating The Old Dead Guys Blog, a joint blog by H. L. Mencken and George Orwell. Sample blog postings are included to speed the tutorial. The blog postings are shorter, public-domain essays by the two co-bloggers.
I’m not completely happy with the template tag example; while embedding Youtube videos is common, embedding them into the template is not.
I don’t know when I’ll complete the command-line Django chapter or the Modifying Models chapter. We didn’t get that far, so I didn’t write that far.
If you use it to learn or to teach, I hope it’s an enjoyable experience!
The inspiration makes more sense if you pronounce SQL the common but non-standard way rather than speaking each individual letter.
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- Django: Beyond the SQL
- Django is a great application framework for Python and web applications. You can use it to greatly speed up your database and application development both on the web and on the command line. This tutorial is currently a very rough draft; it probably won’t be very useful without the assistance of someone who knows Django running the tutorial. If I ever run this tutorial a second time, I’ll probably update it with screenshots to make it more usable for individuals.
- Djangology: Django Reinhardt (CD)
- Twenty-three wonderful tracks from Django Reinhardt’s 1949 to 1950 recordings—his first post-war recording with Hot Club partner Stephane Grappelly—include the original 12 tracks from the 1961 RCA album, and 11 additional tracks. The included booklet has the full original liner notes from the album by Playboy editor Don Gold.
- George Orwell
- Orwell is among the most widely admired political and cultural commentators of the twentieth century. He is known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language, decrying the effects of cliché, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on thought.
- H. L. Mencken
- “Mencken was an outspoken defender of freedom of conscience and civil rights, an opponent of persecution and of injustice and of the puritanism and self-righteousness that masks the oppressive impulse.”
- Installing Django in Mac OS X Leopard
- If you’re looking to play around with web applications in Python, Django is a great way to start.
More Django
- Reusing Django’s filter_horizontal
- Just as with pop-ups, it’s possible to use the built-in JavaScript for filtering multiple-selection popups on custom forms.
- Django formsets and date/time fields
- Date/Time fields in Django formsets appear to have incompatible default values, resulting in forms using them always looking as though they’ve got a new entry when they don’t.
- Multiple Input Fields with multiple inheritance
- We needed to display one TextField as either a TextInput or a Textarea, depending on the value in the field. Multiple inheritance makes it easy, if a bit wonky.
- Django: Beyond the SQL
- Django is a great application framework for Python and web applications. You can use it to greatly speed up your database and application development both on the web and on the command line. This tutorial is currently a very rough draft; it probably won’t be very useful without the assistance of someone who knows Django running the tutorial. If I ever run this tutorial a second time, I’ll probably update it with screenshots to make it more usable for individuals.
- Django actions as their own intermediate page
- The Django documentation recommends a complicated URL redirect to handle admin actions that need an intermediate page. But there’s no reason we can’t just piggy-back the intermediate page on the action itself.
- 22 more pages with the topic Django, and other related pages
More tutorials
- JavaScript for Beginners revised
- I’ve completely revised my JavaScript for Beginners tutorials to be more in tune with modern JavaScript, and to provide more useful examples in general.
- Invariant sections to disappear from the FDL?
- The Free Software Foundation is revisiting the GNU Free Documentation License. Hopefully, they’ll fix the problem of invariant sections in otherwise open documents.
- Perls before Swine Perl tutorial
- I’ve completely revamped my Perl tutorial, and explicitly released it under the Gnu FDL. This tutorial starts from a simple filter that does nothing but echo to the terminal window, and ends with the ability to split data according to fields and import data into a SQLite database.
- Persistence of Vision tutorial
- A step-by-step tutorial, available under the Gnu Free Documentation License, on using the Persistence of Vision raytracer.
- JavaScript for Beginners update
- The JavaScript tutorial has been updated by introducing loops earlier, and in the first section.
- Two more pages with the topic tutorials, and other related pages