simple is better than complex

This is a very simple trick that can help you optimize your database queries using the Django ORM.

Serving a HTTPS only Django Application is very important to secure your users data. If your application have user authentication it is already a good reason to start using HTTPS only. Otherwise usernames and passwords will be exposed traveling over HTTP in plain text. Meaning if a user is using a public internet connection, and he logs in your application, he is vulnerable to a sniffer attack.

Django comes with a set of template filters to add a “human touch” to your data. It is used to translate numbers and dates into a human readable format.

from django.shortcuts import redirect

View decorators can be used to restrict access to certain views. Django come with some built-in decorators, like login_required, require_POST or has_permission. They are really useful, but sometimes you might need to restrict the access in a different level of granularity, for example only letting the user who created an entry of the model to edit or delete it.

When it comes to build forms, Django Forms can be really handy. If your application provide ways for the end-user to input data, it’s strongly advised to do so through the built-in Django Forms. It will automate a good amount of work as well as providing a really stable and secure functionality.

In this article you will find some useful tips regarding starting a new Django project and preparing a development environment. The steps below describes what I generally do when I’m starting a new project.

Web applications relies on several number of parameters to run properly on different environments. To name a few from a Django app settings: database url, password, secret key, debug status, email host, allowed hosts. Most of these parameters are environment-specific. On a development environment you might want to run your application with debug mode on. Also, it’s a clever idea to keep your secret key in a safe place (not in your git repository).

Learning Django and Python can be very fun. I personally love programming with Python and for the most part, work with the Django framework. But in the beginning some stuff can be confusing, especially if you are coming from a Java or C♯ background, like me.