Django for Designers
Introduction
In this tutorial, we will explain topics and provide commands for you to run on your own computer. You will leave with a working social bookmarking web app!
This is a tutorial on web programming, so we will go beyond just Django and discuss third-party Django apps and other real-world web development tools. We'll also be emphasizing areas of Django that particularly affect designers, such as static files, template inheritance, and AJAX.
Things you should know already
- HTML familiarity
- Basic Python proficiency
- Basic or better Javascript proficiency
- Pre-requisites that we will help with
We expect you to have git, Python, and a few other elements ready on your laptop before the tutorial. We have published a laptop setup guide that steps you through:
- Installing Python, git, pip, virtualenv, and a reasonable text editor
- Setting up your env with Django, South, and django-debug-toolbar
- Basic command line knowledge (cd, ls, etc)
- Basic git knowledge
- Setting up your git repo for the tutorial
Things you do not need to know already:
- Django :)
- What an ORM is
- Anything database related
Curriculum
- Part 0: Laptop setup (do this already!)
- Part 1: Starting our project
- Part 2: URLs, basic views, templates, static files
- Part 3: Models, our database, and making it visible
- Part 4: CRUD
- Part 5: Style time
- Part 6: Sharing with others
- Part 7: Exercises for the reader
A possibly-helpful cheatsheet for common command line operations (PDF)