Articles & Tutorials

Django documentation

Covers pretty much everything you need to know about Django in order to use it in your development projects, from the first steps to advanced development process.
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Choosing an API framework for Django

“This works pretty well in a number of simple cases, but doing things like pagination, posting of data, metadata, API discovery, and other important things ends up being a bit more work. This is where the resource oriented API frameworks come in…”
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Building a Higher-Level Query API: The Right Way to Use Django’s ORM

“In this article, I’m going to argue that using Django’s low-level ORM query methods (filter, order_by etc) directly in a view is (usually) an anti-pattern. Instead, we should be building custom domain-specific query APIs at the level of the model layer, where our business logic belongs. Django doesn’t make this particularly easy, but by taking a deep-dive into the internals of the ORM, I’ll show you some neat ways to accomplish it…”
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A Guide to Testing in Django

“For many people, testing their Django applications is a mystery. They hear that they should be testing their code but often have no clue how to get started. And when they hit the testing docs, they find a deep dive on what functionality is available, but no guidance on how to implement…”
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Deploying Django on Heroku

“The following assumes you’re fairly proficient with Django and these steps are only useful for getting a barebones proof of concept site up and running. I do provide the database and caching bits for you, so you can use this as a stepping stone for trying out more full-featured projects on Heroku…”
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Using Signals in your Django App

“Django includes a “signal dispatcher” which helps allow decoupled applications get notified when actions occur elsewhere in the framework. In a nutshell, signals allow certain senders to notify a set of receivers that some action has taken place…”
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A Django setup using Nginx and Gunicorn

“This is a howto on setting up Django on a Linux (Ubuntu) system using Nginx as a reverse proxy and Gunicorn as a Django service. The conventional way to run Django in production these days is usingApache2 and mod_wsgi. While there’s nothing wrong with that approach, I prefer Nginx. I also like to be able to control Django server separately from the web server…”
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Behind the Scenes: From HTML Form to Storage

“In this post, we are going to see what happens behind the scenes when a file is uploaded to a django powered web application…”
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Backbone.js and Django

“The main task is to develop a RESTful handler to support the Backbone.js RESTful JSON interface. In the case of Django there’s no way to directly implement a function to handle the corresponding HTTP method (or perhaps I couldn’t find one). So in order to avoid too many if’s I’ve created a dictionary (methods) with the HTTP methods (key) and the corresponding function (value). When the restful function is called it returns the corresponding function by getting one of the dictionary values with request.method as the key…”
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Django Requirements for a project

“An article about required Django applications packages when starting new django project.”
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Tools & Applications

South

“South is a tool to provide consistent, easy-to-use and database-agnostic migrations for Django applications.”
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Django Debug Toolbar

“The Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel’s content.”
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Haystack

“Haystack lets you write your search code once and choose the search engine you want it to run on. With a familiar API that should make any Djangonaut feel right at home and an architecture that allows you to swap things in and out as you need to, it’s how search ought to be.”
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Sentry

“Sentry is a realtime event logging and aggregation platform. It specializes in monitoring errors and extracting all the information needed to do a proper post-mortem without any of the hassle of the standard user feedback loop.”
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Django Extensions

“Django Extensions is a collection of custom extensions for the Django Framework.”
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Django ImageKit

“ImageKit is a Django app that helps you to add variations of uploaded images to your models. These variations are called “specs” and can include things like different sizes (e.g. thumbnails) and black and white versions.”
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Django Easy Maps

“This app makes it easy to display a map for given address in django templates. No API keys, manual geocoding, html/js copy-pasting or django model changes is needed.”
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Pinax

“Pinax is an MIT-licensed, open-source platform built on the Django Web
Framework. By integrating numerous reusable Django apps and providing starter projects and infrastructure tools, Pinax takes care of the things that many sites
have in common so you can focus on what makes your site different.”
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Django CMS

“A Django application for managing hierarchical pages of content, possibly in multiple languages and/or on multiple sites. Django CMS handles the navigation rendering for you with clean, slug based URLs, and this navigation can be extended by custom Django applications”
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Django Notification

“Many sites need to notify users when certain events have occurred and to allow configurable options as to how those notifications are to be received.”
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Books

The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right

“Django, the Python–based equivalent to Ruby’s Rails web development framework, is one of the hottest topics in web development today. The Definitive Guide to Django is broken into three parts, with the first introducing Django fundamentals such as installation and configuration, and creating the components that together power a Django–driven web site. The second part delves into the more sophisticated features of Django, including outputting non–HTML content such as RSS feeds and PDFs, caching, and user management. The appendixes serve as a detailed reference to Django’s many configuration options and commands.”

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Beginning Django E-Commerce

“Beginning Django E-Commerce guides you through producing an e-commerce site using Django, the most popular Python web development framework. Topics covered include how to make a shopping cart, a checkout, and a payment processor; how to make the most of Ajax; and search engine optimization best practices. Throughout the book, you’ll take each topic and apply it to build a single example site, and all the while you’ll learn the theory behind what you’re architecting.”

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Django JavaScript Integration: AJAX and jQuery

“This book will teach you how to enrich your AJAX applications with Django and jQuery in a practical manner with minimum fuss. It introduces AJAX basics, gets a little deeper, and then goes chapter-by-chapter through a carefully chosen case study. It demonstrates how different pieces of a Django AJAX application work in themselves and are put together and specifically leads you through building an intranet employee photo directory with social networking features. This book is for people looking to integrate AJAX / JavaScript functionality into their web applications. It is for Django users who are looking to easily integrate AJAX features into their applications.”

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Django Design Patterns

“Django design patterns is an ebook to help you with writing better Django code. It collects Django design patterns classified in views, urls and logical areas, and contains more than 50 tips.”

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The Djen of Django

“You already know a bit of Django but you would like to take your skills to next level. This book is for you. Through real, live projects this book allows you to improve your Django skills. Build a blog, build a wiki, build a project management system to put your skills to work.”

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Videos & Podcasts

Advanced Django Tutorial

Hacked Existence – Django Tutorial

Getting Started with Django – Best Practices

Building a blog in 30 mins with Django

A Django Podcast

Greg and Bryan work the Django beat with a weekly podcast that covers everything that is new in the world of Django. With regular guests and topics on a variety of subjects that matter most to the discerning Django developer.
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Django Screencasts

Django Screencasts delivers periodic screencasts that help beginning to intermediate programmers get the most out of the Django Framework, a web framework built on top of the Python programming language. Each episode will either feature short focused tips and tricks that you can apply to your own project immediately, or longer tutorial pieces that help guide you in new subject areas.
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