czech: переводы

→I already have a project for the apps I use on my site, so I started by creating a new application within my project.
manage.py startapp portfolio
I decided I needed three models to put it together: Project, Client (so I could group projects with the same client) and Medium (web, print, etc.—also for grouping projects). Since I wanted to keep it simple, I could have just used text fields for client and medium, but since those make sense as relationships and it’s easy enough to define them separately up front, I did.

→Step 1. Write the model (10 minutes)

→I haven’t updated my portfolio in three years. To give you an idea of how long that is in Internet years, it was one of the first sites I coded entirely by hand, and one of my first all-CSS layouts. I’ve reluctantly added a few pieces here and there over the years, but I cringed every time I went back to that code. I considered recreating it with a hacked-up Movable Type blog, but that ship has sailed.

→How I built a portfolio app in 30 minutes with Django

→In fact, it’s possible to build an entire app or site using entirely generic views, without writing a single line of actual view code. I did it this weekend. Want to see? OK, let’s go.

→That’s where generic views come in. They’re a set of simple, commonly-used views that are built in to Django for reuse in your apps. They’re designed as a utility for programmers to save time creating the same routine code so they can get on to more important things, but they’re pretty handy on their own too.

→But most of the time I don’t need anything that complicated. Most of the time—probably 80% of the time—I need the same simple views: a list view, a detail view and maybe some date-based archives.

→Views are another story. In a framework like Django, views are where what programmers like to call “business logic” happens, with functions and routines and queries and optimization and all that scary stuff. In a word (or two): actual programming.

→And I can get my head around a model. It’s just a definition of objects and their attributes. Conceptually, it’s a lot like writing CSS rules or Javascript objects. You’re just declaring properties, there’s no advanced logic required.

→There are really three basic steps you need to build a basic web app in Django. You need to define models (what your data is), views (how requests for your data are returned) and templates (how your data is displayed). I know how to write templates (and any web designer who’s ever customized a Movable Type template or hacked up some PHP includes does too).

→The missing link

→I’ve finally been able to realize that dream (sniff), thanks to a little feature in Django called generic views. Jeff showed the world what a non-programmer can do with Django’s generic views (and a lot of pictures of drunk girls). So what’s so special about something so… generic?

→As a designer for World Online, I’ve been involved with the development of Django since before it was Django. I may have been the first person other than Adrian and Simon to use the template language in production. I told Simon halfway through that first project that I’d never used a template language that made so much sense to me. From the beginning, I’ve always held out hope that I would be able to take advantage of that on my personal projects, without bugging the programmers to write code for me.

→I remember when people were just getting excited about Rails. It was all about the demo. Build a blog (or whatever) in 30 minutes. It was so elegant that even designers were getting into it. I tried, but I hit a wall. I’m not a programmer, I probably never will be, and Rails is for programmers. Even the templates use Ruby. That’s great for some, but it’s not for me.