I am new to the IT area and want to create my own site. I know a lot IT skills(SQL, basic JAVA, Python etc) but lack of the full pictures of a website.
The components I know are:
front end: what ever people see, ( HTML, JS, CSS,)
back end: The server, the database, the application (one kind of coding language, SQL) and an API to connect the back and front end (I am not sure what kind of skill I need in here, maybe TOMCAT or something)
Besides,I need a domain.
That is all I know.. I just want to have a full pictures of a non static website.
Thanks very much
Given your skillset, you are already very close to creating a dynamic (non-static) website.
With HTML/JS/CSS you can create a purely static website. This is the UI.
With Database manipulation languages like SQL, you can modify the content in databases. This is the database.
So what you are missing right now, is a way to connect the two (UI and Database) - and that is where a server side language can come in handy.
I suggest playing around with a simple server-side languages (PHP, for example) to get started.
Related
I've been building some simple websites with django and am somewhat comfortable with it, enough to use models, templates and apps at least.
Now, I'm making a website for a friends small business that will have shopping cart functionality, and will display inventory. He doesn't have anything in stock and get's it all from wholesalers, so inventory will be shown directly from wholesalers database who have an API.
Everything I could find when searching for a tutorial covered creating an API, not using one.
Do I have to have a mode or a database locally? Or is everything taken from the API as a series of get requests?
How do I pull say, all cars that are yellow, or all that are yellow made by BMW, and display on my inventory page with pagination?
Not asking for a specific set of instructions here, just a very high level overview so I know what to search for to teach myself how to do this.
consuming an api is not a django related, it 's python related. An easy way to consume an api is python's requests library.
Regarding your question on how to handle the data. Both of your ways are possible with some advantages and disadvantages. If you always get the data from the api, they will be always up to date but the load time is longer. If you download all data first to you local database, you need to rebuild their datastructure but loading time it faster and you can use the power of the django orm.
A third option might be that you query the product data from the frontend via javascript so that you just have to build views to handle action such as "add to shopping basked" or "checkout".
I've just been approached by my boss about the possibility of white labeling our Django-based site for a new, large customer. Basically, it sounds like it would mainly be changing the graphics/logos on the site. But, I'm sure that at some point they will want to start tweaking the business logic as well. I'm still unclear whether the desire is for it to be a subdomain (e.g. customer.mydomain.com) or a completely new custom domain. Ultimately, it will need to share the database with the rest of the system (for multiple reasons). Is this a good use of the Sites Framework in Django? Or is there a better way of doing this?
More info: Django 1.3.1; PostgreSQL 9.1; Hosted on Heroku
Use a combination of middleware (to set the active site) and context processors (to act on that). You could try to hook into contrib's site framework, but I've always outgrown it rather quickly.
I'm new to Django and I come from Drupal family. There we have Organic Groups with which we can create groups of content and subsites; how do I do something like that with Django?
Say I'm making this site for my company using Django and every department in my company needs a private section on the site. For example, the design people have their own part of the website into which the back-end developers can not come in. And the back-end developers will have the same thing too.
I want to build the site in such a way that I just login into Django admin and add a new category or subsite or group (whatever the Django term is) with the same settings from other groups or with similar settings.
It depends on what you mean by "private section". You should probably try looking at it from a different angle:
Django splits a site's functionality by means of "apps". Each app does its specific thing, and gets a set of tables in the database. Apps can access each others' tables. For example, it's common for other apps to access the Auth app's user, group, and permissions tables. Is this what you mean by "sub sites"?
As for access control, users can be assigned to groups and they can have various administrative permissions assigned to them. Add, change, and delete permissions are automatically generated for each model (i.e. database table). You can also add your own permissions.
I don't think you'll be able to separate the designers from the back-end developers at the Django level. You'll need to do something else, such as maintain separate source repositories for each and merge them to create the usable site (each group would have read-only access to the other). It really depends on your teams' discipline, because these elements can get intertwined.
Django recommends that static files be served by something else, say directly from your web server, or from another machine with a simple HTTP server (no CGI/WSGI/whatever). This is because Django can only slow down static files compared to direct service. However, for testing, ther is a static page server you can enable.
Given all that, static files usually amount to CSS, images, media, and JavaScript. Of these, the back-end people might want to mess with the JS, but that's it, so this could be in the designers' repo.
The Django tree itself has the code for the site and the apps. It's almost all back end stuff. The exception is the HTML template files, located in the "templates" directory in each app. These are the files that are filled in with the context data supplied by the back-end view code. I have no idea if this is front or back end for you guys; it could be mostly back end if there's a lot of CSS discipline, but I think that's unlikely.
There are a lot of things that you can do in Django that make life easier for one side or the other. For example, template tags allow custom Python code to generate HTML to insert into the page. I use these to generate tab bars and panes, for example.
I really can't help much more without getting a better picture of what your needs are. The question is still vague. You're probably best off taking a day or two going through the tutorial, seeing what the Django perspective is, and then working out how (or if!) it fits into your needs.
I am an ASP.NET MVC / WebForms developer by trade, so all of the websites/apps I have created in the past allowed me to use Master/Layout pages for the look/feel of all my site, while allowing me to change just the parts specific to that page.
Now, I am doing some freebie web work for a friend and I want to write it in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using Aptana 3 so that it can be hosted wherever. Master pages are not an option for me since I am no longer in the ASP.NET/Visual Studio world, so I am looking at Server Side Includes to accomplish this. My question:
Is this a good use of SSI? I am seeing conflicting forum posts, where some say that they should be used for small pieces of the page (like a specific piece of text, time, etc). I want it to generate a large portion of my page, things like the footer, footer links, menus, banner image, etc. Basically, I want to use SSI for most of the page, and then just plug in the pieces specific to the page. Have others done this in the past with success?
If the purpose behind you choice is so that it can be hosted anywhere, then even using SSI may be restrictive since it relies on that functionality being enabled on a server.
Having said that, it is a valid option, but personally I would familiarise yourself with both the options in PHP and .NET so that you are comfortable in adapting your code to both. You are rarely going to be asked to move a site hosted on one framework to another, and if you are then you can factor changing the code into your costs.
I'm developing a web application. It's months away from completion but I would like to build a landing page to show to potential customers to explain things and gauge their interest--basically collecting their email address and if they feel like it additional information like names + addresses.
Because I'm already using Django to build my site I thought I might use another Django App to serve as this landing page. The features I need are
to display a fairly static page and potentially a series of pages,
collect emails (and additional customer data)
track their actions--e.g., they got through the first two pages but didnt fill out the final page.
Is there any pre-existing Django app that provides any of these features?
If there is not a Django app, then does anyone know of another, faster/better way than building my own app? Perhaps a pre-existing web service that you can skin and make look like your own? Maybe there's the perfect system but it's PHP?--I'm open for whatever.
Option 1: Google Sites
You can set it up very very quickly. Though your monitoring wouldn't be as detailed as you're asking for.. Still, easy and fasssst!
Option 2: bbclone
Something else that may be helpful is to set up some PHP based site (wordpress or something) and use bbclone for tracking stuff on it. I've found bbclone to be pretty intense with the reporting what everyone does - though it's been a while since I used it.
Option 3: Django Flatpages
The flatpages Django contrib app is pretty handy for making static flat pages. I'd probably just embed a Google Docs Form to collect email addresses (as that's super fast and lets you get back to real work). But this suggestion would still leave you needing to figure out how to get the level of detail you want on the stats end.
Perhaps consider Google Analytics anyway?
Regardless, I suggest you use Google Analytics with everything. That'll work with anything you do really, and for all I know, perhaps you can find a way to get the stats you're really looking for out of it.