Dynamic Django Base

INTRO

This base project will save you time updating urls in numerous places. You can maintain site pages and django app information in one place - the admin!

A base starter project - pages and website sections can appear dynamically anywhere you like on your website:

Created in the admin:

• Flat Pages
  • Create pages such as 'about us'.
  • Dynamically appear in the navbar, sidebar and footer.
• Website sections
  • Title, text, url and image of any django apps you create - usable anywhere on your website with by loading a template tag (see basehtml app).
  • Dynamically appear on the homepage as a grid and in navbar menu.
  • Dynamically appear under category headings in the sidebar and footer.

FEATURES

Completely adpatable, the base project consists of these :

• Base HTML
  • Includes template tags for displaying flat pages and website sections - you can load these template tags anywhere in your website design
  • Also, a copyright_message template tag allows you to add optional start year and company name - automatically updates the copyright message in the footer!
• Flat Pages
  • Template for flat pages - customizable
  • TinyMCE editor for any flat pages you create.
• Website Sections
  • Any urls you create for any custom apps you build can be added here and displayed anywhere you like.
• Homepage
  • Allows you to solely focus on building the homepage.
  • Models in homepage can be used to import any models you like from other apps you create.

DEMO IMAGES

For these demo images, I created two flat pages and three website sections that appear under two website categories:

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GETTING STARTED

• This project is development ready NOT production ready. (See docs for deploying a Django project)
• All project and app files you will need to get started with this project are included in the 'dynamicdjangobase' directory.
• NOTE: If you are new to Django, some of these files will be created automatically when you start a Django project. This is normal.
• NOTE: Other directories will be created such as migrations (when you make changes to models) and pycache (caches python files). Again this is expected.
• The project directory 'dynamicdjangobase' will be created automatically inside your virtual environment when you run django startapp.

STEPS

• Setup a directory where you will place the project.

• In the Linux or Mac terminal or Windows terminal (Start -> Windows System -> Command Prompt) navigate to the directory.

• Setup a virtual environment (presuming you have Python installed on your system)...

• Activate the virtual environment - (dynamicdjangobase) must appear at the start of the line if activated correctly.

LINUX/ MAC: source bin/activate
WINDOWS: Scripts\activate

• Install django

pip install django

• Install tinmyce-django - text editor for flat pages

pip install django-tinymce

• Install pillow for images - Imaging Library adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter.

pip install Pillow

• Install python-decouple

pip install python-decouple

• Start django project (you can call it anything you prefer)

django-admin startproject dynamicdjangobase

• Start all of the apps included in the project - app directories will be created automatically...

django-admin startapp basehtml
django-admin startapp flatpages
django-admin startapp homepage
django-admin startapp websitesections

• When you have copied over all of the files from this repo to your app directories, migrate the changes to the database - (inserts tables for the models)
• Make sure you are in the directory 'dynamicdjangobase' with the file 'manage.py' inside...

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

• Setup a .env file in the same project level directory that contains 'manage.py'
• Copy the secret key variable directly (without ' ') from the project 'settings.py' file like this...

.env file....

SECRET_KEY=the_secret_key_number_in_settings.py
DEBUG=True

• Look at how SECRET_KEY and DEBUG are hidden by python-decouple in the 'settings.py' file.
• You can add any database names and passwords to your .env file in production.

There are other django libraries available for working with Bootstrap... check out the docs for:

• django-compressor (for Bootstrap)
• django-libsass (for Bootstrap)