Creating a blog with django, part 1: models

In this tutorial, I'll walk you through one possible way of creating a basic blog application using django 1.3's class-based generic views, built-in admin interface and syndication framework.

Note: this tutorial was written for django 1.3, and is therefore out of date.

I'll assume that you are familiar with some django fundamentals, specifically:

  • Creating a new project
  • Creating a new app
  • Setting up a database and configuring django's database settings
  • The basics of django models, templates, views, urlconfs etc.

If you aren't familiar with these things, then I suggest you work through the 'first steps' tutorial on the django website.

Start with an existing django project or create a new one, and make sure the database settings are up and running. We'll call the project directory mysite for convenience. Create a new app called blog and open mysite/blog/models.py. Our models will include a Post class to represent blog posts and a Tag class to represent the different categories a post can be placed in:

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# models.py

from django.db import models
from datetime import datetime

class Tag(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20, unique=True)

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=120)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=120, unique_for_date='publication_date')
    publication_date = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)
    body = models.TextField()
    tags = models.ManyToManyField(Tag)

Each Tag instance has only one attribute, a name, which is implemented as a CharField with a unique value (unique=True).

The Post class is somewhat more interesting. It has a title attribute, a main body of text a publication_date that defaults to the time at which the individual post was created.

The tags attribute implements a many-to-many relationship with Tag; Each blog post can fall under many categories, and each category can include many blog posts.

The slug attribute is a SlugField, which contains a 'slug' - a short, human-readable label for a blog post, used as part of its URL, and consisting only of letters, numbers, underscores and/or hyphens. Setting the unique_for_date option to 'publication_date' ensures that no two blog posts can have both the same publication_date and the same slug.

Finally, append 'mysite.blog' to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. Run python manage.py validate to check that your models are valid, and create the database tables corresponding to your models by typing `python manage.py syncdb.

Now you are ready for the next installment of this tutorial, which will intergrate our model with django's admin framework.