.. -*-restructuredtext-*-


==========================================
Practical Django Projects (second edition)
==========================================

This is the source code for the applications covered in the second
edition of "Practical Django Projects", published by Apress. If you do
not have a copy of the book, this code may or may not be useful to you
as a guide to learning Django, as all explanations of this code and
the rationale behind it is contained solely within the text of the
book.


Obtaining a copy of Django
==========================

The second edition of "Practical Django Projects" was written with the
upcoming Django 1.1 release in mind. However, the final release date
of Django 1.1 will occur after the publication of this edition of the
book. Until Django 1.1 is released, you will need to visit `the Django
download page <http://www.djangoproject.com/download/>`_ and follow
the instructions for obtaining the "development version". Once Django
1.1 is released, simply follow the posted instructions for downloading
and installing it.

Also, note that Django development is an ongoing process and new
releases of Django will be issued from time to time. If you are
starting on the second edition of "Practical Django Projects" and the
latest Django release is **newer** than 1.1 (e.g., Django 1.2, or a
bugfix release like Django 1.1.1), you should download and install the
latest officially-released version of Django instead of Django 1.1.


About this code
===============

The online home of this code is at
<http://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/practical-django-projects/>, which
hosts a version-controlled Mercurial repository containing the
code. Chapter 11 of the book covers the topic of version control, and
offers an extremely basic introduction to Mercurial; if you have
Mercurial installed and would like to use it to obtain a copy of the
code, simply type::

    hg clone http://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/practical-django-projects/

Initially, each changeset in the repository represents a piece of code
written or changed at a particular point in the book. Each commit
message mentions the page number(s) in the book to which a given
changeset corresponds, and Mercurial tags in the repository mark the
start and end of each chapter.

Also, it is expected that public access to this repository will be
opened up before all code has been placed in the repository; if you
find that you are browsing this repository before all of the code has
been added, please be patient while the process of placing code in the
repository is completed.

Once the full code from the book has been checked in to this
repository, further changesets will represent corrections and/or
updates as needed; for example, if errors are found in the code as
originally printed, changesets will be added to this repository to
correct them.

If you believe you have found an error in the book's code, please
first check the latest copy of the code in the repository to determine
whether a correction has already been made. If no correction is
present in the repository, please consult Apress' errata page for the
second edition of "Practical Django Projects" to view all current
errata and submit suggested corrections:
<http://www.apress.com/book/errata/1164>


How this code is structured
===========================

"Practical Django Projects" covers three applications: a simple
content-management system, a weblog, and a social code-sharing
application. All code listed in the book for these applications is
present in this repository, in Python modules corresponding to the
names used in the book. Thus, for example, the CMS covered in Chapters
1-3 can be found in the directory ``cms``.

To correspond with the manner in which it is presented in the book,
the ``cms`` directory contains the full project developed over the
course of the first three chapters. For the remaining applications
covered in the book, no project code is provided, only application
code; as covered in the book's text, you should feel free to reuse the
``cms`` project for the remaining applications, or to create new
projects as desired.

Templates covered in the book are present in the directory
``templates``, organized in subdirectories corresponding to the
sections of the book with which they are associated. Additional files
(containing neither Python code nor templates) are present in the
directory ``extras``.


Differences between code in this repository and code in the book
================================================================

To ensure that a copy of the code in this repository can be run
directly with a minimum of fuss, the settings file for the ``cms``
project in this repository makes use of Python's ``os.path`` module to
allow specifying the location of the SQLite database and template
directory relative to the location of the ``cms`` directory. For
details on this technique, consult Chapter 11 of the book.