part-2-webpage.md

Implement webpage app into a new project

Create a new Django Project

To get things started we are going to create a new Django project in which we will implement all the generic apps mentioned in the last post. You can either follow this and the upcoming posts step-by-step or you can clone this GitHub Repo https://github.com/acdh-oeaw/django-generic-apps and check out the matching tags. This is up to you.

Start with https://github.com/acdh-oeaw/django-generic-apps/commit/337adfd12fb9358ab7977eba0a58cdf3c0468630

Virtual Environment

But before we are getting started for real, let's create a virtual environment for Python 3.4. and install Django 1.9.x.

$ conda create --name rlunch python=3.4

$ activate rlunch or for Linux users: $ source activate rlunch

$ pip install Django==1.9.5

(As you can see, I am using Anaconda)

Example Project

Then I will change into the /django-generic-apps directory I got by cloning the repo mentioned above and create my sample project called rlunch (which stands for Research-Lunch).

$ django-admin startproject rlunch

This command created the new directory /django-generic-apps/rlunch which is the root directory of our Django project. Change into this directory and try if everything worked so far, by typing the following commands:

$ cd rlunch

$ python manage.py runserver

Now you should be able to browse to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and see something like depicted below:

Stop the development server (ctrl+c), migrate the current database scheme and then create a superuser:

$ python manage.py migrate

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

Include webpage-app

Now download the zipped webpage-code from here, unzip it and copy the 'webpage'-folder into the project's root directory. (/django-generic-apps/rlunch/webpage). The next thing we have to do is to register this new app into our projects settings-file. Therefore open /django-generic-apps/rlunch/rlunch/settings.py and add 'webpage' to INSTALLED_APPS:

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

Then open your project's urls configuration /django-generic-apps/rlunch/rlunch/urls.py and include the webpage-urls:

from django.conf.urls import url, include
from django.contrib import admin

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
    url(r'^', include('webpage.urls', namespace='webpage')),
]

Now start your development server again:

$ python manage.py runserver

But this will throw the following error message:

ImportError: No module named 'crispy_forms'

Looks like we are missing some packages. So let's install crispy_forms by typing:

$ pip install django-crispy-forms

And we also want to update the requirements.txt file, or to be more precise, lets create a new one called requirements_webpage.txt and store it in the webpage directory:

$ pip freeze > requirements_webpage.txt

After we installed crispy-forms we have to register and configure them in the project's settings file:

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

CRISPY_TEMPLATE_PACK = "bootstrap3"

When we now run $ python manage.py runserver, we should be able to browse to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and see something like depicted below:

Update Projects Metadata

What is now left to do is to update the project's metadata. To do this open \rlunch\webpage\metadata.py and edit according to your project's needs:

# this files contains basic metadata about the project. This data will be used
# (by default) in the base.html and index.html

PROJECT_METADATA = {
    'title': 'Research-Lunch',
    'author': 'Peter Andorfer',
    'subtitle': 'A django-generic-apps example app',
    'description': 'This is an exapmle project to demonstrate how to implement django-generich-apps',
    'github': 'https://github.com/acdh-oeaw/django-generic-apps',
    'purpose_de': 'Das Ziel des Projekts "Research-Lunch" ist die Dokumentation der Implementierung der sogeannten "django-generic-apps"',
    'purpose_en': 'The purpose of the project "Research-Lunch" is the documentation of the implementation fo the so called "django-generic-apps".'}

Conclusion and outlook:

In this post we went through the basic steps of implementing one django-generic-app.

1. Copy the app directory into your project's root directory.
2. Register the app in your settings file.
3. Register your app's URLs in your project's basic URL config file.
4. Add some app specific configurations if needed.
5. Install dependency packages.
6. Make migrations if needed.
7. Add links to you app in the base template (if needed).

In the next post, we will create a custom app which will then serve as integration point for other django-generic-apps.