Introduction to Django

This is the basic outline, based on revised content from a previous talk and a new “forms” section:

Introduction

• Django’s philosophy
• Some basic terminology
• Getting started

Models

• What’s a model?
• Writing models
• The model API
• Model metadata
• Relationships (foreign key, many-to-many, one-to-one)

The Django admin

• What is it?
• Activating the admin
• Live demo

Views

• What are views?
• URLs; Mapping URLs to views
• Dissecting a request
• Writing a view

Templates

• What’s a template?
• Why use templates?
• Writing templates.
• Tags/filters
• Template inheritance

Forms

• What makes a “good” web form?
• Defining and handling basic forms
• Using model forms

Generic views

• What are generic views?
• Using list/detail generic views
• Using date-based generic views

Wrap-up

• Where to go for help
• How to get involved in Django’s community

If people have their own laptops with Django installed, they should be able to follow along with the tutorial as it goes. I won’t, however, be allowing time to write code, nor will I spend time helping attendees install Django. The complete code for the tutorial will be available so that attendees can hack and tweak as we go. In the past about half the audience has done so; the other half simply took notes or fooled around with their own projects.