Rapid Django Web Services.

Rapid Django Web Services is a custom script that you can run on Windows Linux or Mac OSX. The script creates a fully functional website complete with a graphical Front-end, and graphical Back-end. Contained within the script are as follows:

1. Singup Form - username, email,password1, password2
2. Login Form - username, password, /logout.
3. News Blog - Basic functional blog with comments
4. Bootstrap - getbootstrap.com Basic Template with jumbotron
5. Media Content - 'static', and 'media' already configured
6. Graphical Static Page - flatpage function turned on so you can begin creating static flat pages that rarely change but use a graphical interface.
7. Profile Model - An extended user model linked to a user profile model.

Why Did I Create this

Django is relatively easy to setup and configure, but I got tired of creating the same features for every new website I create. Nearly everyone needs the six items I listed above. This script saves several hours of work and gives you the opportunity to create a new model specific for the customer and allows you to begin working on a flexible front end that can be changed easily.

Prerequisites

The following needs to be installed:

1. Python3
2. Pip - This can be done through python easy_install. Brew, yum or apt. I believe the pacakge is python3-pip
3. Django. After pip is installed you can run the following: pip install Django

Installation

Clone the repo and copy newrapidsetup.py and mystring.py to a preferred directory

Running the Script

Open a terminal and type 'python newrapidsetup.py'. The script will ask you the name of your project. Type in the new name and wait a minute for the script to populate a directory with everything setup

Starting Django Web Server

You need to run the following commands first before starting the server for the first time.

1. 'python manage.py makemigrations'
2. 'python manage.py migrate'
3. 'python manage.py createsuperuser'

Run the Server

1. 'python manage.py runserver'

Now visit the website using your browser: http://127.0.0.1:8000

Explore the site. You can add users, add news, and add comments. Currently you have to be 'staff' to add news. As an administrator you can specify if the user or can have access to the blog model.

Only users can add comments. This forces new users to sign up. The administrator specifies if the post comment is authorized or not.

Currently Blog posts can be added only through the admin tool. And news comments can be added using the admin tool or the form.

You can create the same form for the news blog that appears the same for the comments form. It's a matter of creating, a new url, a new view method, a new form method, and a new template.

This can be changed easily. I have an example of how to create a blog from scratch called blog.md. You could create a new field called authorized. If the user is logged in and authorized. you could give them permission to add a blog or create comments. I would suggest creating something simple like a movie database or book database and test how a user can work with the new model and make changes at a user level.

settings.md

This contains some last minute things to change before going live. You can adjust the settings.py and those entries.

Also I added a few other things to make this heroku compatible. Copy the Procfile over change it to the name of the repo you created. Copy of the req.txt and perhaps rename it to requirements.txt. You might have to create static directory and add load static to the base.html file.

New Models

Creating new models (database content) rapidly is the power of Django's ORM (Object Relational Mapper). If you know python you can write python instead of verbose SQL statements.

Creating a view without a model is simple. The basicapp that comes with this script shows an example of a view:

def index(request):
	return render_to_response("index.html")

This method uses render_to_response library to point to a template index.html

The model.py however is a simplified script that abstracts the creation of SQL statements. Example:

class Post(models.Model):
	title=models.CharField(max_length=60)
	body=models.TextField()

The SQL command for the method listed above is as follows:

CREATE TABLE "blog_post" ("id", integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTOCREMENT,
"title" varchar(60) NOT NULL, "body" text NOT NULL,); 

Next Steps

If you are new to python or new to django. Please Buy My book at http://www.rapidpythonprogramming.com

If you would like to create a blog from scratch or the signup from scratch. Take a look at the following example file templates. You can use the example to create other models or application tools.

1. StaticFlatFile
2. Blog
3. Sign