Notes on starting to use Django

Summary

Hello! One of my favourite things is starting to learn an Old Boring Technology that I’ve never tried before but that has been around for 20+ years. It feels really good when every problem I’m ever going to have has been solved already 1000 times and I can just get stuff done easily. I’ve thought it would be cool to learn a popular web framework like Rails or Django or Laravel for a long time, but I’d never really managed to make it happen. But I started learning Django to make a website a few months back, I’ve been liking it so far, and here are a few quick notes! I spent some time trying to learn Rails in 2020, and while it was cool and I really wanted to like Rails (the Ruby community is great!), I found that if I left my Rails project alone for months, when I came back to it it was hard for me to remember how to get anything done because (for example) if it says resources :topics in your routes.rb, on its own that doesn’t tell you where the topics routes are configured, you need to remember or look up the convention. Being able to abandon a project for months or years and then come back to it is really important to me (that’s how all my projects work!), and Django feels easier to me because things are more explicit. In my small Django project it feels like I just have 5 main files (other than the settings files): urls.py, models.py, views.py, admin.py, and tests.py, and if I want to know where something else is (like an HTML template) is then it’s usually explicitly referenced from one of those files. For this project I wanted to have an admin interface to manually edit or view some of the data in the database. Django has a really nice built-in admin interface, and I can customize it with just a little bit of code. For example, here’s part of one of my admin classes, which sets up which fields to display in the “list” view, which field to search on, and how to order them by default. @admin.register(Zine) class ZineAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): list_display = ["name",...