What You'll Build and Learn

Get Started With Django: Build a Portfolio App Martin Breuss 04:42

Before you get started with any web development project, it’s a good idea to come up with a plan of what you’re going to build. In this course, you’re going to build a portfolio where you can showcase your web development projects.

You won’t be using any external Python libraries in this course. One of the great things about Django is that it has so many features that you don’t need to rely on external libraries. However, you will add Bootstrap 4 styling in the templates.

By building your portfolio, you’ll learn the basics of Django models, view functions, forms, templates, and the Django admin page. With knowledge of these features, you’ll be able to build loads more applications. You’ll also have the tools to learn even more and build sophisticated Django sites.

00:00 In this third video, we’ll take a look at the project that you’re going to build throughout this video course, and we’ll take a look at a couple of concepts that we’re going to learn while working through all of those videos.

00:12 Let’s start off by taking a look at the project. This is the final version of the project that you’re going to build. It will be a portfolio app, so you can see in here a project that you built.

00:24 You can fill it up, obviously, with your own information. The projects are going to contain images, they’re going to have a title as well as a description, and you can add as many projects as you want—everything that you build.

00:38 Additionally to this overview page, each of those projects has its detail page. You can click on Read More and it redirects you to a details page for that specific project that can have some additional information—in this case, the technology that we built it with—and you can navigate back to the list view.

01:00 We also are going to work with the admin interface to make it easy to add and edit your project entries.

01:08 Here’s a quick peek on how that looks like. Inside of here, you will be able to edit the project very simply, and delete it, or also go ahead and add new projects so that you can keep your portfolio up-to-date.

01:25 With building out your portfolio as a web app, we’re going to touch down on a lot of interesting Django concepts and in the end, you will also end up with a very useful final project—your portfolio—that you can put online and show the projects that you’re building to potential employers.

01:47 So, here’s a quick overview of some of those important concepts that we’re going to learn when going through this video course. First of all, you’re going to learn how to build a Django project from start to finish: all the way from installing Django all the way to having the finished project sitting on your localhost.

02:07 We’ll do lots of Django deep-dives on the way, so I’m often going to be asking, “How does this actually work?” and we’re going to try to unravel it and take a look at what’s happening behind the scenes so that we get a better and deeper understanding of what does Django actually do.

02:24 On the way, we’ll encounter Django error messages. That’s something I find, personally, very important: that you get friendly with Django error messages and don’t consider them as problems, but actually as what they are, which are helpful friends that can assist you in figuring out how to solve a problem and how to better understand what’s actually happening.

02:45 That means we’ll do quite a lot of hands-on debugging approaches. We’re going to talk about them and you will see me doing them, which will help you also when you’re building other Django projects that are completely unrelated because the errors are going to stay the same and the ways of debugging are going to be helpful for any other project that you will go to do by yourself.

03:07 One thing that we’re going to start off doing—still in this section—is understanding Django projects and the Django file structure.

03:15 We will understand how a request comes into a Django project and how it flows through the apps. We will talk about models, views, and templates—the most important parts of a Django project.

03:28 Which files do they relate to, and what do they actually mean? We’ll have a little primer on using relational databases: what they are and how to interact with them using Django’s ORM.

03:40 We will interact with the database both from the Django shell as well as the Django admin interface. We will also talk about, as well as use, the Django templating language in order to help us automatically generate the pages that we will use for our app.

03:57 We will also utilize template inheritance to avoid repetition in those templates. We’ll talk about some more advanced concepts, such as proper URL resolving, how do we correctly use path converters, and how to build namespaces and make sure that linking between different templates works well. And finally, we’re also going to use Bootstrap for style and make sure that our page is mobile-responsive so that it looks good on all devices.

04:25 All right, so that’s a quick overview. Now, let’s get started by looking at Django apps and Django projects. Remember, for now, we’re just going to take a look, so relax and enjoy the ride. See you in the next video!

jaytreelove on June 19, 2020

I’m excited to build this webapp!

Marijan Milovec on Sept. 15, 2020

Hi I have a question, will course go through the development in Docker, so you can easily deploy your application on some public cloud GCP or AWS. I know that perhaps this is not a candidate for this but I am asking regarding the concept and a lot of companies are working that way today, so it would be really nice to get those skills in this course. Or some other course. But in generally how developer should develop such application?

Thank you

Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on Sept. 15, 2020

We’re working on it. Stay tuned 🎵

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