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Next Steps: Make a Blog

Getting Started With Django: Building a Portfolio App Martin Breuss 03:19

In this course, you built a Django portfolio, learned a lot about how Django functions, and made friends with a lot of error messages!

If you’d like to keep building this project, you can check out the article this course is based on to add a blog to your site. A blog is a great way to share your technical knowledge and writing skills with the world.

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00:00 Hey, for the final video! In this video course, we built out a pretty cool Django portfolio. We learned a lot about how Django functions and what to take care of.

00:11 Most of all, we made friends with a lot of error messages and made sure that these things are not actually scary, but helpful tips for us to know how to develop forward.

00:20 Now, you might be wondering what’s a possible next step from here, and I have a good tip for you. In the original Real Python written tutorial, there’s a section on how to also create a second app for this project that’s going to be a blog.

00:35 So, a blog is a great way of showing your technical writing skills—and some knowledge, also—with the world, additionally to the projects that you built. Therefore, adding a blog app to your Django project—to your portfolio project—can be a great way to move forward from here.

00:50 I’ll show you how this can look like. So up here, we have another tab now that says Blog. If you click on here, it takes us to a different app inside of our Django project that has different models, it has different views.

01:06 So, all of this stuff that we built inside of the projects app is going to be different inside of the blog app. In here, you can see, we have categories, so we can filter by categories: only show the Django-related posts, or show all of them.

01:20 You can click on the title of a post to, again, get to a details view, similar to in our projects app. Here, you can have all the texts for your blog, and we also have the functionality to leave a comment.

01:32 So, I can type in here my name, “this is great!”,

01:40 Submit a comment. So users that come and visit your page could also leave a comment on the article that you wrote.

01:50 This nicely integrates together with our portfolio app. Here we have the projects. Again, we can go to the details, et cetera. Up top, in our navigation bar, we can switch to the blog and then take a look at the awesome stuff that you can write about your Python and web development knowledge.

02:09 We have the models registered inside of our admin interface, so you can easily create new categories here, as well as create new posts—same way that we did for our projects.

02:25 In this case, you will have to associate it with a Category object, and then that’s what allows us to do this filtering that I showed you before—let’s take another look at it…

02:38 filtering so that we would, for example, only see the crickets-related posts up here. Sweet! So, this could be a great next step to make your portfolio page even better.

02:50 Make sure to head over to the associated Real Python tutorial and build out your blog for your portfolio app and share all the interesting knowledge that you have inside of your personal blog.

03:03 That’s it for now. Keep learning, keep working on things, keep building stuff—that’s really where all the magic lies. Thanks for being part of this tutorial and I hope to see you around!

03:16 Bye-bye.

Martin Breuss RP Team on Dec. 7, 2022

Thanks everyone, and glad to hear that you’re finding the course content helpful :D

melissac on April 11, 2023

Thank you for this wonderful course. Your approach is so thorough and well-explained. I recently jumped into the deep end with a team working on a Django project, and have been trying to learn as I go. This course gave me so much more confidence and has already proven useful as I’ve seen various errors pop up. I’m sure I will be returning to these videos multiple times.

Allen Floyd on Sept. 30, 2023

Thank you for this tutorial Martin, it was very informative, now I just need to learn how to create a Blog app from scratch to go with this project, one that allows user comments.

alnah on Oct. 4, 2023

Hi Martin! I enjoyed the course. I took out a pen to jot down the key points from the videos. After each section, I revisited my notes and applied what I had learned. It took me roughly 15 hours to go through everything and get it all working with a good understanding. I feel a bit frustrated that I haven’t mastered Bootstrap for the frontend yet, but I understand that the primary focus of the course was to introduce the basics of Django and ORM. The materials and feedback were helpful for styling the project. I’m eager to learn more advanced topics in the future. Thanks!

Martin Breuss RP Team on Oct. 5, 2023

@alnah glad you enjoyed it and found it useful, and thanks for sharing how long it took you to go through the course thoroughly. I think that’s very valuable also for other learners to hear about—it’s not just about watching a course, but if you want to understand the contents, it takes a lot more time and work. Great that you put the time and work into it 🙌

And yes… unfortunately the front end is a whole other story :P

Also thanks to @melissac and @Allen Floyd for the nice words :D

We’ll have a dedicated written tutorial about how to add the blog to an app like this coming out soon!

Mercy Orangi on Feb. 3, 2024

I just finished the course, thank you Martin for explaining Django so well! I’ve been coding in Python, and most courses I’ve gone through give an already set-up Django app boiler plate to build upon, so it was refreshing to understand the principles behind most of what I couldn’t before. Definitely going to challenge myself this month to complete the blog part, and host it on Heroku.

Martin Breuss RP Team on Feb. 5, 2024

@Mercy Orangi yay, glad you liked it and found the course helpful! :D

Also, if you want some guidelines for the blog, then you can check out the tutorial on how to build a blog from scratch in Django and the tutorial on hosting a Django project on Heroku.

alphafox28js on Sept. 11, 2024

Hello @ Martin, hey, so I would love to add the Blog inside the actual Project Templates accessing through the Read More interactive icon, I am speculating as of right now that I would be creating a new blog inside the portfolio, and have it outside of the Projects folder, however, I would rather implement inside of the individual projects themselves. therefore, i am leaning towards putting the blog folder inside the project dir? I think? from there update the admin/apps/url/vies/models from the templates dir… is this correct thought?

Martin Breuss RP Team on Sept. 13, 2024

@alphafox28js hi I’m not sure I understand your question. Do you want to:

a) Have individual, separate blogs for each project?
b) Have a central blog that you can also access from the projects?

Both is possible, but I think that a) is not such a great choice. Would make more sense to me to have a separate blog/ app where you keep all the models and templates related to a blog post, and then just link to there from your project pages.

alphafox28js on Sept. 17, 2024

@MartinBreuss, option b would work, however, for what ever reason, the blog did not populate in the on the project page. Going to have to go back through and set everything up again i suppose

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