Django and Bootstrap

2018-01-10 [Petri]

Being a geek, I took the creation of this site as a personal challenge: I had been working with HTML years ago, so it was time to see what new was going on in this area.

Even though I had not done any HTML-related work for years, I did have some top-level knowledge of the latest and greatest new toolsets, so when I started to plan for a supporting website for the book, the obvious choice for HTML framework was Bootstrap. It offers easy-to-use building blocks for relatively complex website features, like the Carousel in the Gallery-section of this site.

But as I wanted to automate as much as possible also for the dynamic content, like managing the Carousel, Links and Blog data, I searched further for a higher-level framework that could still incorporate Bootstrap for the look and feel, and I found Django.

It has proven to be extremely powerful, and for a newcomer, the only issue has been that the versions of Django and the underlying Python language have been developing rapidly, and thus a lot of the information on the web is becoming outdated: it is worth taking a look at the date of the information that you find when trying to "do X" and you are searching for pointers on the web.

Also, for someone who has been dealing with computer languages that use various combinations of brackets to control the code flow, Python's non-bracket approach has been a novel experience and a source of some obscure bugs. But the richness of Python environment, especially when combined with Django, is amazing, and I have truly only scratched the surface so far.

Populating a Carousel page from Django is ridiculously easy: the actual complexity of the underlying functionality just "appears". I was astonished that the demo Carousel code I adapted to work dynamically with my Gallery database content worked on the first try.

Another time saver is the automated administration support for any database tables that you create: Django creates the maintenance forms for you as soon as you add your data model to the admin settings.

All this is beautiful stuff for a nerd who has formerly spent days to achieve something that even remotely resembles the automation that the combination of Django + Bootstrap offers.

No wonder that once you have delved into the Bootstrap structure, you notice that a lot of the pages on the Internet are using the same framework.

There is still N ways to do the same thing in Django, but I have tried to utilize the object-based paradigm for all views, except for the very simplest ones, like the home page.

All in all, it is amazing how powerful tools there are in public domain these days. My warmest thanks to all those hundreds, or more likely, thousands of developers who have made tools like Bootstrap and Django possible. Not forgetting the zillions of hours that have gone into the Linux OS that powers this stuff.

You can start your personal journey to the utilization of these great frameworks from here:

Bootstrap
Django

Permalink: https://bhoew.com/blog/en/8

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