Django Girls

Djagno, girls, cake and MVC at CodeUps workshop

I started learning programming in Python but I’ve never used Django before so time to learn! Django Girls is a community led effort to help more women into programming by providing a safe space to learn and a supportive community full of inspiring mentors and helpful resources.

The workshop started Friday night for a social getting everything installed and set up party. Hackathons have taught me that installing and setting up environments can take a long time and get a little bit frustrating especially if you’re new to programming.

Saturday was spent working through the example project - to set up a Django blog site and get it deployed live. Mine can be found here: annad.pythonanywhere.com.

I started by setting up a virtual environment to work in, very useful for switching between Python versions and managing the workspace.

Then a whistle stop tour of MVC through Django.

I set my Model as a new Post Object. I added my new Post object Post to manage my blog posts. I listed it as a Model and created a class for it with properties of a blog post (author, title, text, publish date) and a method to publish the post.

Once I’d created the model, I needed to inset the entry in my database using the Django migrate manage helper functions.

First running makemigrations with Posts as my new model, so I can create an entry in the database.

Running migrate synchronizes the database with the Models. So the changes I made to the Model is updated in the database.

Once I had created my Model and updated my database I needed to create a View to display my blog posts.

Under my new blog directory I created a blog template which I would later extract into a base template and a body content template.

The interactive Django shell is a great tool for running Django commands like inserting entries into the database, editing them or deleting them. Having a play around on the shell was a great way to test parsing the Posts objects and find ways to display the data.

post = Post.objects.filter(published_date__isnull=True).order_by('created_date')
post.get('title' == 'Sample title')

I added the queries into my Views to correctly display all the posts that matched the given criteria, firstly to display a list of all blog posts in date order.

Next steps

• PR to fix documentation in the Django girls tutorial. Querysets
• Beef up my website. Extra things. Add draft posts
• Added security so only I can post.
• Change password and username functionality
• Styling!!