Creating Django Application and Introduction to Django Models(Part IV)

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to make Django Application and have a look at what Django Models are.

This tutorial is a part of our series on Creating Blog Website using Django.

Link to the Previous tutorial:

Setting up Database for Django project and running Server(Part III)

Starting a Django Application

To keep all the files and folders tidy, we are going to create a separate application for our blog in our Project.

To create an application, open up Terminal/Console in same directory containing manage.py, activate the Virtual Environment and then run the following commands:

For Windows :

python manage.py startapp blog1

For Linux/Mac OS :

python manage.py startapp blog1

where ‘blog1’ is the name of Application.

Now, you can see a folder with the same name as your application in the virtual environment directory with a file structure similar to :

codespeedy_venv
├── blog1
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── admin.py
│   ├── apps.py
│   ├── migrations
│   │ └── __init__.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── tests.py
│   └── views.py
├── db.sqlite3
├── manage.py
├── site1
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
└── requirements.txt

After that, we need to tell Django to use the newly created application. For that open site1/settings.py and in the INSTALLED_APPS section and an item ‘blog1‘, at the last of the list. It should look something like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'blog1',
]

Learn,

• Setting up Database for Django project and running Server(Part III)
• Why Python Is The Most Popular Language For Machine Learning

Django Objects and Models

There is a concept called Object Oriented Programming. In this rather than monotonously writing code in a single sequence, we model things and define how they interact with each other.

Objects are a collection of Methods and Properties. For example, let us say for our Blog post we need properties including Author’s name, Title, Published date and the content of the post. As for the methods, we will create a method publish which will put the posts on our website.

Post
--------
title
text
author
published_date

Now, a Model in Django is a special kind of object which can be saved in the database.

We can further think of model as a spreadsheet containing some rows and columns, which further provides a framework for creating a more similar type of objects.

That’s it for now! We will continue with creating Models in the next tutorial.

Feel free to comment down any doubt you face understanding the above steps.

Next part of this tutorial series:

Creating Django Models and their Tables in the database(Part V)

Have a look at some other posts:

How to implement Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm in Python

Membership and Identity Operator in Python