In this article by Asad Jibran Ahmed author of book Django Project Blueprints we are going to start with a simple blogging platform in Django. In recent years, Django has emerged as one of the clear leaders in web frameworks. When most people decide to start using a web framework, their searches lead them to either Ruby on Rails or Django. Both are mature, stable, and extensively used. It appears that the decision to use one or the other depends mostly on which programming language you’re familiar with. Rubyists go with RoR, and Pythonistas go with Django. In terms of features, both can be used to achieve the same results, although they have different approaches to how things are done.

One of the most popular platforms these days is Medium, widely used by a number of high-profile bloggers. Its popularity stems from its elegant theme and simple-to-use interface. I’ll walk you through creating a similar application in Django with a few surprise features that most blogging platforms don’t have. This will give you a taste of things to come and show you just how versatile Django can be.

Before starting any software development project, it’s a good idea to have a rough roadmap of what we would like to achieve. Here’s a list of features that our blogging platform will have:

Users should be able to register an account and create their blogs
Users should be able to tweak the settings of their blogs
There should be a simple interface for users to create and edit blog posts
Users should be able to share their blog posts on other blogs on the platform

I know this seems like a lot of work, but Django comes with a couple of contrib packages that speed up our work considerably.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

The contrib Packages

The contrib packages are a part of Django that contain some very useful applications that the Django developers decided should be shipped with Django. The included applications provide an impressive set of features, including some that we’ll be using in this application:

Admin: This is a full-featured CMS that can be used to manage the content of a Django site. The Admin application is an important reason for the popularity of Django. We’ll use this to provide an interface for site administrators to moderate and manage the data in our application.
Auth: This provides user registration and authentication without requiring us to do any work. We’ll be using this module to allow users to sign up, sign in, and manage their profiles in our application.
Sites: This frameworkprovides utilities that help us run multiple Django sites using the same code base. We’ll use this feature to allow each user to have his own blog with content that can be shared between multiple blogs.

There are a lot more goodies in the contrib module. I suggest you take a look at the complete list at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/contrib/#contrib-packages.

I usually end up using at least three of the contrib packages in all my Django projects. They provide often-required features such as user registration and management and free you to work on the core parts of your project, providing a solid foundation to build upon.

Setting up our development environment

Let’s start by creating the directory structure for our project, setting up the virtual environment, and configuring some basic Django settings that need to be set up in every project. Let’s call our blogging platform BlueBlog.

To start a new project, you need to first open up your terminal program. In Mac OS X, it is the built-in terminal. In Linux, the terminal is named separately for each distribution, but you should not have trouble finding it; try searching your program list for the word terminal and something relevant should show up. In Windows, the terminal program is called the Command Line. You’ll need to start the relevant program depending on your operating system.

If you are using the Windows operating system, some things will need to be done differently from what the book shows. If you are using Mac OS X or Linux, the commands shown here should work without any problems.

Open the relevant terminal program for your operating system and start by creating the directory structure for our project and cd into the root project directory using the following commands:

> mkdir –p blueblog 
> cd blueblog

Next, let’s create the virtual environment, install Django, and start our project:

> pyvenv blueblogEnv
> source blueblogEnv/bin/activate
> pip install django
> django-admin.py startproject blueblog src

With this out of the way, we’re ready to start developing our blogging platform.

Database settings

Open up the settings found at $PROJECT_DIR/src/blueblog/settings.py in your favorite editor and make sure that the DATABASES settings variable matches this:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
    }
}

In order to initialize the database file, run the following commands:

> cd src
> python manage.py migrate

Staticfiles settings

The last step in setting up our development environment is configuring the staticfiles contrib application. The staticfiles application provides a number of features that make it easy to manage the static files (css, images, and javascript) of your projects. While our usage will be minimal, you should look at the Django documentation for staticfiles in further detail as it is used quite heavily in most real-world Django projects. You can find the documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/howto/static-files/.

In order to set up the staticfiles application, we have to configure a few settings in the settings.py file. First, make sure that django.contrib.staticfiles is added to INSTALLED_APPS. Django should have done this by default.

Next, set STATIC_URL to whatever URL you want your static files to be served from. I usually leave this to the default value, ‘/static/’. This is the URL that Django will put in your templates when you use the static template tag to get the path to a static file.

Base template

Next, let’s set up a base template that all the other templates in our application will inherit from. I prefer to have templates that are used by more than one application of a project in a directory named templates in the project source folder. To set this up, add os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates') to the DIRS array of the TEMPLATES configuration dictionary in the settings file, and then create a directory named templates in $PROJECT_ROOT/src. Next, using your favorite text editor, create a file named base.html in the new folder with the following content:

<html>
<head>
    <title>BlueBlog</title>
</head>
<body>
    {% block content %}
    {% endblock %}
</body>
</html>

Just as Python classes can inherit from other classes, Django templates can also inherit from other templates. Also, just as Python classes can have functions overridden by their subclasses, Django templates can also define blocks that children templates can override. Our base.html template provides one block to inherit templates to override called content.

The reason for using template inheritance is code reuse. We should put HTML that we want to be visible on every page of our site, such as headers, footers, copyright notices, meta tags, and so on, in the base template. Then, any template inheriting from it will automatically get all this common HTML included automatically, and we will only need to override the HTML code for the block that we want to customize. You’ll see this principal of creating and overriding blocks in base templates used throughout the projects in this book.

User accounts

With the database setup out of the way, let’s start creating our application. If you remember, the first thing on our list of features is to allow users to register accounts on our site. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ll be using the auth package from the Django contrib packages to provide user account features.

In order to use the auth package, we’ll need to add it our INSTALLED_APPS list in the settings file (found at $PROJECT_ROOT/src/blueblog/settings.py). In the settings file, find the line defining INSTALLED_APPS and make sure that the ‘django.contrib.auth’ string is part of the list. It should be by default but if, for some reason, it’s not there, add it manually.

You’ll see that Django has included the auth package and a couple of other contrib applications to the list by default. A new Django project includes these applications by default because almost all Django projects end up using these.

If you need to add the auth application to the list, remember to use quotes to surround the application name.

We also need to make sure that the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list contains django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware, django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware, and django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware. These middleware classes give us access to the logged in user in our views and also make sure that if I change the password for my account, I’m logged out from all other devices that I previously logged on to.

As you learn more about the various contrib applications and their purpose, you can start removing any that you know you won’t need in your project. Now, let’s add the URLs, views, and templates that allow the users to register with our application.

The user accounts app

In order to create the various views, URLs, and templates related to user accounts, we’ll start a new application. To do so, type the following in your command line:

> python manage.py startapp accounts

This should create a new accounts folder in the src folder. We’ll add code that deals with user accounts in files found in this folder. To let Django know that we want to use this application in our project, add the application name (accounts) to the INSTALLED_APPS setting variable; making sure to surround it with quotes.

Account registration

The first feature that we will work on is user registration. Let’s start by writing the code for the registration view in accounts/views.py. Make the contents of views.py match what is shown here:

from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.views.generic import CreateView


class UserRegistrationView(CreateView):
    form_class = UserCreationForm
    template_name = 'user_registration.html'

    def get_success_url(self):
        return reverse('home')

I’ll explain what each line of this code is doing in a bit. First, I’d like you to get to a state where you can register a new user and see for yourself how the flow works. Next, we’ll create the template for this view. In order to create the template, you first need to create a new folder called templates in the accounts folder. The name of the folder is important as Django automatically searches for templates in folders of that name. To create this folder, just type the following:

> mkdir accounts/templates

Next, create a new file called user_registration.html in the templates folder and type in the following code:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block content %}
<h1>Create New User</h1>
<form action="" method="post">{% csrf_token %}
    {{ form.as_p }}
    <input type="submit" value="Create Account" />
</form>
{% endblock %}

Finally, remove the existing code in blueblog/urls.py and replace it with this:

from django.conf.urls import include
from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib import admin
from django.views.generic import TemplateView
from accounts.views import UserRegistrationView

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='base.html'), name='home'),
    url(r'^new-user/$', UserRegistrationView.as_view(), name='user_registration'),
]

That’s all the code that we need to get user registration in our project! Let’s do a quick demonstration. Run the development server by typing as follows:

> python manage.py runserver

In your browser, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/new-user/ and you’ll see a user registration form. Fill this in and click on submit. You’ll be taken to a blank page on successful registration. If there are some errors, the form will be shown again with the appropriate error messages. Let’s verify that our new account was indeed created in our database.

For the next step, we will need to have an administrator account. The Django auth contrib application can assign permissions to user accounts. The user with the highest level of permission is called the super user. The super user account has free reign over the application and can perform any administrator actions. To create a super user account, run this command:

> python manage.py createsuperuser

As you already have the runserver command running in your terminal, you will need to quit it first by pressing Ctrl + C in the terminal. You can then run the createsuperuser command in the same terminal. After running the createsuperuser command, you’ll need to start the runserver command again to browse the site.

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If you want to keep the runserver command running and run the createsuperuser command in a new terminal window, you will need to make sure that you activate the virtual environment for this application by running the same source blueblogEnv/bin/activate command that we ran earlier when we created our new project.

After you have created the account, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and log in with the admin account. You will see a link titled Users. Click on this, and you should see a list of users registered in our app. It will include the user that you just created.

Congrats! In most other frameworks, getting to this point with a working user registration feature would take a lot more effort. Django, with it’s batteries included approach, allows us to do the same with a minimum of effort.

Next, I’ll explain what each line of code that you wrote does.

Generic views

Here’s the code for the user registration view again:

class UserRegistrationView(CreateView):
    form_class = UserCreationForm
    template_name = 'user_registration.html'

    def get_success_url(self):
        return reverse('home')

Our view is pretty short for something that does such a lot of work. That’s because instead of writing code from scratch to handle all the work, we use one of the most useful features of Django, Generic Views. Generic views are base classes included with Django that provide functionality commonly required by a lot of web apps. The power of generic views comes from the ability to customize them to a great degree with ease.

You can read more about Django generic views in the documentation available at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/class-based-views/.

Here, we’re using the CreateView generic view. This generic view can display ModelForm using a template and, on submission, can either redisplay the page with errors if the form data was invalid or call the save method on the form and redirect the user to a configurable URL. CreateView can be configured in a number of ways.

If you want ModelForm to be created automatically from some Django model, just set the model attribute to the model class, and the form will be generated automatically from the fields of the model. If you want to have the form only show certain fields from the model, use the fields attribute to list the fields that you want, exactly like you’d do while creating ModelForm.

In our case, instead of having ModelForm generated automatically, we’re providing one of our own, UserCreationForm. We do this by setting the form_class attribute on the view. This form, which is part of the auth contrib app, provides the fields and a save method that can be used to create a new user. You’ll see that this theme of composing solutions from small reusable parts provided by Django is a common practice in Django web app development and, in my opinion, one of the best features of the framework.

Finally, we define a get_success_url function that does a simple reverse URL and returns the generated URL. CreateView calls this function to get the URL to redirect the user to when a valid form is submitted and saved successfully. To get something up and running quickly, we left out a real success page and just redirected the user to a blank page. We’ll fix this later.

Templates and URLs

The template, which extends the base template that we created earlier, simply displays the form passed to it by CreateView using the form.as_p method, which you might have seen in the simple Django projects you may have worked on before.

The urls.py file is a bit more interesting. You should be familiar with most of it—the parts where we include the admin site URLs and the one where we assign our view a URL. It’s the usage of TemplateView that I want to explain here.

Like CreateView, TemplateView is another generic view provided to us by Django. As the name suggests, this view can render and display a template to the user. It has a number of customization options. The most important one is template_name, which tells it which template to render and display to the user.

We could have created another view class that subclassed TemplateView and customized it by setting attributes and overriding functions like we did for our registration view. However, I wanted to show you another method of using a generic view in Django. If you only need to customize some basic parameters of a generic view—in this case, we only wanted to set the template_name parameter of the view—you can just pass the values as key=value pairs as function keyword arguments to the as_view method of the class when including it in the urls.py file. Here, we pass the template name that the view renders when the user accesses its URL. As we just needed a placeholder URL to redirect the user to, we simply use the blank base.html template.

This technique of customizing generic views by passing key/value pairs only makes sense when you’re interested in customizing very basic attributes, like we do here. In case you want more complicated customizations, I advice you to subclass the view; otherwise, you will quickly get messy code that is difficult to maintain.

Login and logout

With registration out of the way, let’s write code to provide users with the ability to log in and log out. To start out, the user needs some way to go to the login and registration pages from any page on the site. To do this, we’ll need to add header links to our template. This is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how template inheritance can lead to much cleaner and less code in our templates.

Add the following lines right after the body tag to our base.html file:

{% block header %}
<ul>
    <li><a href="">Login</a></li>
    <li><a href="">Logout</a></li>
    <li><a href="{% url "user_registration"%}">Register Account</a></li>
</ul>
{% endblock %}

If you open the home page for our site now (at http://127.0.0.1:8000/), you should see that we now have three links on what was previously a blank page. It should look similar to the following screenshot:

quick-user-authentication-setup-django-img-0

Click on the Register Account link. You’ll see the registration form we had before and the same three links again. Note how we only added these links to the base.html template. However, as the user registration template extends the base template, it got those links without any effort on our part. This is where template inheritance really shines.

You might have noticed that href for the login/logout links is empty. Let’s start with the login part.

Login view

Let’s define the URL first. In blueblog/urls.py, import the login view from the auth app:

from django.contrib.auth.views import login

Next, add this to the urlpatterns list:

url(r'^login/$', login, {'template_name': 'login.html'}, name='login'),

Then, create a new file in accounts/templates called login.html. Put in the following content:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block content %}
<h1>Login</h1>
<form action="{% url "login" %}" method="post">{% csrf_token %}
    {{ form.as_p }}

    <input type="hidden" name="next" value="{{ next }}" />
    <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>
{% endblock %}

Finally, open up blueblog/settings.py file and add the following line to the end of the file:

LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/'

Let’s go over what we’ve done here. First, notice that instead of creating our own code to handle the login feature, we used the view provided by the auth app. We import it using from django.contrib.auth.views import login. Next, we associate it with the login/ URL. If you remember the user registration part, we passed the template name to the home page view as a keyword parameter in the as_view() function. This approach is used for class-based views. For old-style view functions, we can pass a dictionary to the url function that is passed as keyword arguments to the view. Here, we use the template that we created in login.html.

If you look at the documentation for the login view (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/topics/auth/default/#django.contrib.auth.views.login), you’ll see that on successfully logging in, it redirects the user to settings.LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL. By default, this setting has a value of /accounts/profile/. As we don’t have such a URL defined, we change the setting to point to our home page URL instead.

Next, let’s define the logout view.

Logout view

In blueblog/urls.py, import the logout view:

from django.contrib.auth.views import logout

Add the following to the urlpatterns list:

url(r'^logout/$', logout, {'next_page': '/login/'}, name='logout'),

That’s it. The logout view doesn’t need a template; it just needs to be configured with a URL to redirect the user to after logging them out. We just redirect the user back to the login page.

Navigation links

Having added the login/logout view, we need to make the links we added in our navigation menu earlier take the user to those views. Change the list of links that we had in templates/base.html to the following:

<ul>
    {% if request.user.is_authenticated %}
    <li><a href="{% url "logout" %}">Logout</a></li>
    {% else %}
    <li><a href="{% url "login" %}">Login</a></li>
    <li><a href="{% url "user_registration"%}">Register Account</a></li>
    {% endif %}
</ul>

This will show the Login and Register Account links to the user if they aren’t already logged in. If they are logged in, which we check using the request.user.is_authenticated function, they are only shown the Logout link. You can test all of these links yourself and see how little code was needed to make such a major feature of our site work. This is all possible because of the contrib applications that Django provides.

Summary

In this article we started with a simple blogging platform in Django. We also had a look at setting up the Database, Staticfiles and Base templates. We have also created a user account app with registration and navigation links in it.