simple is better than complex

In this tutorial we are going to explore some of the Django Crispy Forms features to handle advanced/custom forms rendering. This blog post started as a discussion in our community forum, so I decided to compile the insights and solutions in a blog post to benefit a wider audience.

In this tutorial you are going to learn how to implement Token-based authentication using Django REST Framework (DRF). The token authentication works by exchanging username and password for a token that will be used in all subsequent requests so to identify the user on the server side.

This is a short post just to announce today I’m releasing a community forum for the simpleisbetterthancomplex.com readers! And I want you to be part of it.

In this tutorial series, we are going to explore Django's authentication system by implementing sign up, login, logout, password change, password reset and protected views from non-authenticated users. This tutorial is organized in 8 videos, one for each topic, ranging from 4 min to 15 min each.

Django comes with a variety of command line utilities that can be either invoked using django-admin.py or the convenient manage.py script. A nice thing about it is that you can also add your own commands. Those management commands can be very handy when you need to interact with your application via command line using a terminal and it can also serve as an interface to execute cron jobs. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to code your own commands.

This is a quick tutorial to get you start with django-crispy-forms and never look back. Crispy-forms is a great application that gives you control over how you render Django forms, without breaking the default behavior. This tutorial is going to be tailored towards Bootstrap 4, but it can also be used with older Bootstrap versions as well as with the Foundation framework.

Highcharts is, in my opinion, one of the best JavaScript libraries to work with data visualization and charts out there. Even though Highcharts is open source, it’s a commercial library. It’s free for use in non-commercial applications though.

In this post, I will share some tips to help you improve the design of your Django Models. Many of those tips are related to naming conventions, which can improve a lot the readability of your code.

First, let’s get those terms out of our way. The REST acronym stands for Representational State Transfer, which is an architectural design. Usually when we use the term RESTful, we are referring to an application that implements the REST architectural design. API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a software application that we interact programmatically, instead of using a graphical interface. In other words, we interact with it at a lower level at the source code, writing functions and routines.

Dependent or chained dropdown list is a special field that relies on a previously selected field so to display a list of filtered options. A common use case is on the selection of state/province and cities, where you first pick the state, and then based on the state, the application displays a list of cities located in the state.