2. Your First Django Site: A Simple CMS

This is part 2 of a series of posts on James Bennett's excellent Practical Django Projects. The table of contents and explanation can be found here.

Configuring Your First Django Project

Choosing an editor for python is a personal choice. As a beginner you can do worse than just use IDLE which comes with most python distributions (separately on os x)  or pythonwin if you are on the windows platform. These have the advantage of autocompletion of function arguments, but once you're comfortable you're likely to move onto something that manages a project nicely and is more developed. I use Textmate on OS X but there's a full list here. If I have been working on nonpython projects I miss not having autocomplete in Textmate but sometimes I'll just keep IDLE open just for that.

Putting Together the CMS

On p13 is where the first deviation from the older django kicks in. In your settings.py add 'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware', (don't forget the comma) to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES. Django 1.x includes a new forms admin which separates out the administrative configuration from the models. By default the new urls.py includes:

 # Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin:
 # from django.contrib import admin
 # admin.autodiscover()  
 # Uncomment the next line for to enable the admin:
 #   (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),

Which you will want to uncomment to enable the admin
Instead of

 
# (r'^admin/', include('django.contrib.admin.urls')),

On page 15 you must make sure you edit the example.com site instead of adding a new site. You might have noticed in your settings.py the SITE_ID = 1. If you add a new site 127.0.0.1:8000 then that will have a SITE_ID of 2, and in the following section flatpage views filter by default on the current site which is 1.

The urls.py is where beginners face one of their biggest hurdles. On the face of it regular expressions are difficult to craft without practice, and implementations subtly vary from language to language. Time to add to the bookshelf with another bible, Mastering Regular Expressions which is probably more than you'll ever need. On the free front A.M. Kuchling has a great python how-to. One aspect of regexes that irritates is trying to find tools that you can use to test them easily while you are building your own. A few of the tools I have found for OS X have been inconsistent only modestly useful. One online recommendation is this site though I haven't used it yet.

A Quick Introduction to the Django Template System

Once you've finished reading this you might want to head over to Jeff Croft and read his post on default templates.