Tue 03 July 2012
| tags: python , django , tutorials
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Note: this tutorial was written for django 1.3, and is therefore out of date.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:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14 # 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.
