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 at Wikipedia
- 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 at Wikipedia
- “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
- Converting an existing Django model to Django-MPTT
- Using a SQL database to mimic a filesystem will, eventually, create bottlenecks when it comes to traversing the filesystem. One solution is modified preordered tree traversal, which saves the tree structure in an easily-used manner inside the model.
- Two search bookmarklets for Django
- Bookmarklets—JavaScript code in a bookmark—can make working with big Django databases much easier.
- Fixing Django’s feed generator without hacking Django
- It looks like it’s going to be a while before the RSS feed generator in Django is going to get fixed, so I looked into subclassing as a way of getting a working guid in my Django RSS feeds.
- ModelForms and FormViews
- This is just a notice because when I did a search, nothing came up. Don’t use ModelForm with FormView, use UpdateView instead.
- Django: fix_ampersands and abbreviations
- The fix_ampersands filter will miss some cases where ampersands need to be replaced.
- 29 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