Django 3 By Example,: Build powerful and reliable Python web applications from scratch, Third Edition

By Antonio Melé

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Book Mar 2020 568 pages 3rd Edition

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Django 3 By Example, - Third Edition

Enhancing Your Blog with Advanced Features

In the preceding chapter, you created a basic blog application. Next, you will turn your application into a fully functional blog with the advanced functionalities that many blogs feature nowadays. You will implement the following features in your blog:

Sharing posts via email: When readers like an article, they might want to share it with somebody else. You will implement the functionality to share posts via email.
Adding comments to a post: Many people want to allow their audience to comment on posts and create discussions. You will let your readers add comments to your blog posts.
Tagging posts: Tags allow you to categorize content in a non-hierarchical manner, using simple keywords. You will implement a tagging system, which is a very popular feature for blogs.
Recommending similar posts: Once you have a classification method in place, such as a tagging system, you can use it to provide content recommendations...

Creating a comment system

You will build a comment system wherein users will be able to comment on posts. To build the comment system, you need to do the following:

Create a model to save comments
Create a form to submit comments and validate the input data
Add a view that processes the form and saves a new comment to the database
Edit the post detail template to display the list of comments and the form to add a new comment

Building a model

First, let's build a model to store comments. Open the models.py file of your blog application and add the following code:

class Comment(models.Model):
    post = models.ForeignKey(Post,
                             on_delete=models.CASCADE,
                             related_name='comments')
    name = models.CharField(max_length=80)
    email = models.EmailField()
    body = models.TextField()
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated = models.DateTimeField...

Adding the tagging functionality

After implementing your comment system, you need to create a way to tag your posts. You will do this by integrating a third-party Django tagging application into your project. django-taggit is a reusable application that primarily offers you a Tag model and a manager to easily add tags to any model. You can take a look at its source code at https://github.com/jazzband/django-taggit.

First, you need to install django-taggit via pip by running the following command:

pip install django_taggit==1.2.0

Then, open the settings.py file of the mysite project and add taggit to your INSTALLED_APPS setting, as follows:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    'blog.apps.BlogConfig',
    'taggit',
]

Open the models.py file of your blog application and add the TaggableManager manager provided by django-taggit to the Post model using the following code:

from taggit.managers import TaggableManager
class Post(models.Model...

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Key benefits

Learn Django 3 by building real-world web applications from scratch in Python, using coding best practices
Integrate other technologies into your application with clear, step-by-step explanations and comprehensive example code
Implement advanced functionalities like a full-text search engine, a user activity stream, or a recommendation engine
Add real-time features with Django Channels and WebSockets

Description

If you want to learn the entire process of developing professional web applications with Python and Django, then this book is for you. In the process of building four professional Django projects, you will learn about Django 3 features, how to solve common web development problems, how to implement best practices, and how to successfully deploy your applications. In this book, you will build a blog application, a social image bookmarking website, an online shop, and an e-learning platform. Step-by-step guidance will teach you how to integrate popular technologies, enhance your applications with AJAX, create RESTful APIs, and set up a production environment for your Django projects. By the end of this book, you will have mastered Django 3 by building advanced web applications.

What you will learn

Build real-world web applications Learn Django essentials, including models, views, ORM, templates, URLs, forms, and authentication Implement advanced features such as custom model fields, custom template tags, cache, middleware, localization, and more Create complex functionalities, such as AJAX interactions, social authentication, a full-text search engine, a payment system, a CMS, a RESTful API, and more Integrate other technologies, including Redis, Celery, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, and Channels, into your projects Deploy Django projects in production using NGINX, uWSGI, and Daphne

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