atihkin / writing-your-first-django-app Goto Github PK

2011-02-22

This is taken from "Writing your first Django app" at http://goo.gl/t6Jc
for Django version 1.2.5, which was the current stable version on this
date. THE NEXT VERSION HAS CHANGES THAT WILL BE NEEDED TO MAKE THIS
RUN UNDER VERSION 1.3.

The reason for providing the complete final code for the tutorial is
that I found the tutorial hard to follow in places. When I first started,
for example, I was confused in Part I by the section "Playing with 
the API" because it wasn't obvious why the authors were using the
command line to create and modify objects, rather than the admin. By
skipping it, I missed a lot. The second thing that threw me was all
the work writing views that gets thrown away for generic views and
the careful reading that was needed to make all the adjustments that
were described but not spelled out fully. 

The biggest reason, though, was that I had been trying to write my
own application by cribbing from the tutorial and finding that some
things worked, but others didn't, even after I went back and corrected
by initial attempts at translation. I finally decided that I just really
needed to work through the tutorial from beginning to end until it worked
as described and only then should I start using it as a reference for
my own apps. 

If this helps you to get the tutorial example working, 
I suggest going back and working through the tutorial
from scratch, cutting and pasting as you go. You can come back to
these files if you get lost, but you will find that the big
benefit from the material comes with following along step
by step, not just from reading the finished code.

You will need to edit settings.py to change TEMPLATE_DIRS from 

    '/PATH_TO_PARENT_DIRECTORY/tutor/templates',

to reflect the directory to which you have cloned this repository,
such as

    '/home/jason/tutor/templates',

(Windows users, please make the appropriate adjustments.)

My suggestion is to make no other changes until you have the example
code working.

The sample sqlite3 database has a couple of poll objects to get you
started.

You should be able to access the following pages after starting the
development server with:

$ python manage.py runserver

by pointing your browser to:

http://localhost:8000/admin/
http://localhost:8000/polls/
http://localhost:8000/polls/1/
http://localhost:8000/polls/2/

and by following the links. You will get an error page for 

http://localhost:8000/

because no default page has been defined.

For the admin:
username: rc
password: demo