Category: 5. Advanced

Ajax essentially is a combination of technologies that are integrated together to reduce the number of page loads. We generally use Ajax to ease end-user experience. Using Ajax in Django can be done by directly using an Ajax library like JQuery or others. Let’s say you want to use JQuery, then you need to download…

Django comes with a syndication feed generating framework. With it you can create RSS or Atom feeds just by subclassing django.contrib.syndication.views.Feed class. Let’s create a feed for the latest comments done on the app (Also see Django – Comments Framework chapter). For this, let’s create a myapp/feeds.py and define our feed (You can put your feeds…

Before starting, note that the Django Comments framework is deprecated, since the 1.5 version. Now you can use external feature for doing so, but if you still want to use it, it’s still included in version 1.6 and 1.7. Starting version 1.8 it’s absent but you can still get the code on a different GitHub…

To cache something is to save the result of an expensive calculation, so that you don’t perform it the next time you need it. Following is a pseudo code that explains how caching works − Django comes with its own caching system that lets you save your dynamic pages, to avoid calculating them again when…

Sometimes you might want to store some data on a per-site-visitor basis as per the requirements of your web application. Always keep in mind, that cookies are saved on the client side and depending on your client browser security level, setting cookies can at times work and at times might not. To illustrate cookies handling…

So far, in our examples, we have used the Django dev web server. But this server is just for testing and is not fit for production environment. Once in production, you need a real server like Apache, Nginx, etc. Let’s discuss Apache in this chapter. Serving Django applications via Apache is done by using mod_wsgi.…

It is generally useful for a web app to be able to upload files (profile picture, songs, pdf, words…..). Let’s discuss how to upload files in this chapter. Uploading an Image Before starting to play with an image, make sure you have the Python Image Library (PIL) installed. Now to illustrate uploading an image, let’s…

Creating forms in Django, is really similar to creating a model. Here again, we just need to inherit from Django class and the class attributes will be the form fields. Let’s add a forms.py file in myapp folder to contain our app forms. We will create a login form. myapp/forms.py As seen above, the field type can…

In some cases, writing views, as we have seen earlier is really heavy. Imagine you need a static page or a listing page. Django offers an easy way to set those simple views that is called generic views. Unlike classic views, generic views are classes not functions. Django offers a set of classes for generic…

Django comes with a ready and easy-to-use light engine to send e-mail. Similar to Python you just need an import of smtplib. In Django you just need to import django.core.mail. To start sending e-mail, edit your project settings.py file and set the following options − Sending a Simple E-mail Let’s create a “sendSimpleEmail” view to…