Django- Development

Django version of the self-hosted church website and code

Code Explainer

I have used the Heroku Django Template, which is deployment ready. The template can be deployed for free via Heroku free tier. I followed the Heroku Django Template instructions, including creating a virtual environment for the project.

However, I did make one change before pushing my new project to my own GitHub repo. I added python-decouple to the requirements.txt before installation, updated the settings.py, and moved the SECRET_KEY to the .env file. A SECRET_KEY used in production is sensitive information and should not be committed to public source control. I then included the .env file in the .gitignore, so that the .env would remain local and not be pushed to my public GitHub repo. By the way, I used a GitHub Python .gitignore template.

All static files are stored in a root folder called static. All templates are stored in a root folder called templates. The project-level self_hosted_church_website_django/settings.py has been altered so that the static files and templates are located in these root folders, rather than in an app folder. All templates extend from base.html template, which includes soft-coded links to the CSS files. Other templates contain soft-coded links to other static files such as images as needed.

Most of the website pages are static and are rendered at a project-level from self_hosted_church_website_django/urls.py as TemplateView. This means that the templates are fetched from the templates folder based on name and rendered without any need for a model or view. The domain name will prepend the URL I have specified for each of these pages in self_hosted_church_website_django/urls.py.

The Blog requires a model, so these pages cannot be rendered as a simple TemplateView. I have created an app called "blog." In the blog folder are a models.py file containing the blog model and a views.py file containing views for the Blog page and the post detail pages. An entry in the project-level self_hosted_church_website_django/urls.py points to the app-level blog/urls.py, which contains the Blog page and post detail URLs. Because the URLs in the blog/urls.py are app-level, the Blog page URL will be www.domain-name/blog, and the post detail pages will be prepended with www.domain-name/blog. pk model variable and a regular expression in blog/urls.py make it possible for post detail pages to be rendered when blog posts are created in the future.

The Blog page template contains a for loop that will fetch each post and insert the post info (mapped from the model) into the template. This loop will continue until every post is displayed, to form a list. The post-detail template does not need a for loop because only one post will be displayed, with the applicable info again inserted into the template.

URL hyperlinks are based on the "name" variable in self_hosted_church_website_django/urls.py and blog/urls.py.

Primary Folder and File Structure

.env
.gitignore
manage.py
Procfile
README.md
requirements.txt
runtime.txt
self_hosted_church_website_django/
       _init_.py
       settings.py
       urls.py
       wsgi.py
db.sqlite3
blog/
       _init_.py
       admin.py
       apps.py
       models.py
       tests.py
       urls.py
       views.py
static/    
       css/
            bootstrap.css
            bootstrap.min.css
            main.css
       fonts/   
            glyphicons-halflings-regular.eot
            glyphicons-halflings-regular.svg
            glyphicons-halflings-regular.ttf
            glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff
       images/
            adult-choir.jpg
            childrens-choir.jpg
            church-outside-large.jpg
            church-outside.jpg
            church-sanctuary.jpg
            gretas-dog.jpg
            musicians.jpg
            rethink-church-logo.jpg
            stained-glass-window.jpg
            sunflowers.jpg
            thanksgiving-service.jpg
            umw-mission.jpg
            umw.jpg
            welcome-sign.jpg
templates/
       404.html
       about.html
       activities.html
       base.html
       blog.html
       home.html             
       post-detail.html             
       detail-pages/
            children-and-youth-ministries.html
            church.html
            community-outreach.html
            global-church.html
            music-ministry.html
            pretty-prairie.html
            united-methodist-women.html
            welcome.html
            worship.html

High Level Folder and File Descriptions