These are the slides to Eric Floehr's presentation at the October 2010 Central Ohio Python Users Group meeting. There are lot of options when you want a website with things like easy content creation/editing (product pages, about pages, etc.), a blog, and maybe even Twitter status updates. Products like Wordpress, Drupal, and Plone come to mind. But you don't want to learn another new one-off app that you can't easily customize, don't want an enterprisey app, and being the Pythonista programmer that you are, you'd like it it Python and you'd like to build it yourself. That way you know all the ins-and-outs and can customize as you like. From scratch, Eric will show how to build a CMS and blog using Django and best-of-breed reusable apps, demostrating best practices that will allow you to get a site up and working in the shortest time possible (I hope to talk for less than an hour) but allow for the maximum customization in the future. I hope that you will leave the talk able to create your own personal or small business website that is powerful, customizable, and most of all, useful.

1. The Goal:
A Personal or Small Business Website

2. Requirements:
Static Pages
Blog with Comments
Easy to Edit
Extensible

3. Blog first:
Wordpress (#1 by far)
CMS first:
Static HTML pages (#1 by far)
Drupal
Joomla!

4. More Requirements:
Python!

5. Spectrum:
Blogofile
…
Django
…
Plone

6. There are 101 Ways to Make a Website...
You will go MAD trying to figure out the “BEST”
one for you.

7. Django

8. Django Concepts:
MVC – Model Template View
Project
Application
Models / Managers
Templates / Context Processors
Views / Middleware
URL Dispatcher

9. Tools:
Python
Virtualenv
Pip

10. http://djangopackages.com/

11. 1. virtualenv –no-site-packages pyenv
2. source pyenv/bin/activate
3. pip install -e
hg+http://bitbucket.org/stephenmcd/mezzanine#egg=mezzanine
4. mezzanine-project sample
5. python sample/manage.py syncdb
6. python sample/manage.py runserver
A working site in 6 lines

12. Admin
On-page Editing
Template Editing

13. mezzanine.core
mezzanine.blog
mezzanine.forms
mezzanine.pages
mezzanine.settings
mezzanine.twitter

14. Django Debug Toolbar
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-debug-toolbar
# pip install django-debug-toolbar
# python manage.py debugsqlshell
Already configured in Mezzanine

15. Django Command Extensions
http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/
# pip install django-extensions
# python manage.py graph_models blog>blog.dot
# dotty blog.dot
# pip install werkzeug
# python manage.py runserver_plus

16. South
http://south.aeracode.org/
# pip install south
# python manage.py syncdb
# python manage.py schemamigrations … --auto
# python manage.py migrate ...

17. You drive.