Building a Blog Application

In this book, you will learn how to build professional-grade web projects using Django. This initial chapter will guide you through the essential building blocks of a Django application, from installation to deployment. If you haven’t set up Django on your machine yet, the Installing Django section will walk you through the installation process.

Before starting our first Django project, let’s go over what you are about to learn. This chapter will give you a general overview of the framework. It will guide you through the different major components to create a fully functional web application: models, templates, views, and URLs. You will gain an understanding of how Django works and how the different framework components interact.

You will also learn the difference between Django projects and applications, and you will learn about the most important Django settings. You will build a simple blog application that allows users to navigate through all published posts and read individual posts. You will also create a simple administration interface to manage and publish posts. In the next two chapters, you will extend the blog application with more advanced functionalities.

Consider this chapter as your roadmap for constructing a fully-fledged Django application. Don’t be concerned if some components or concepts appear unclear at first. The different framework components will be explored in detail throughout this book.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Installing Python
• Creating a Python virtual environment
• Installing Django
• Creating and configuring a Django project
• Building a Django application
• Designing data models
• Creating and applying model migrations
• Setting up an administration site for your models
• Working with QuerySets and model managers
• Building views, templates, and URLs
• Understanding the Django request/response cycle

You will start by installing Python on your machine.

The source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Django-5-by-example/tree/main/Chapter01.

All Python packages used in this chapter are included in the requirements.txt file in the source code for the chapter. You can follow the instructions to install each Python package in the following sections, or you can install all the requirements at once with the command python -m pip install -r requirements.txt.