Building Websites With Django

A Tutorial by Malcolm Tredinnick

Django is a Python web framework, originally written to support online media sites and released as Open Source in mid-2005. It is the power behind sites such as Lawrence Journal World (http://www.ljworld.com/ ), Chicago Crime (http://www.chicagocrime.org/ ) and some projects at washingtonpost.com (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/ and http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/ ). Designed to make it possible to present data quickly and without needing to continually rebuild the repetitive portions of a site, Django plays in the same space as projects such as Ruby on Rails and TurboGears. Recently, luminaries such as Python creator Guido van Rossum and publisher Tim O'Reilly have been touting Django as one of the things to watch in the future.

This tutorial will be an introduction to people interested in finding out how to use Django for their own projects. Some familiarity with Python will be assumed (although nothing beyond a reading knowledge is required; no really advanced skills). Over the course of the tutorial, we will build a small site based around some existing data and, in the process, cover all the pieces of the Django stack: from the database to Python object mapping, URL configuration, templating language, syndication, and creating other output formats (not just HTML).

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