StandBlog - A Blogging platform

Stand Blog is a simple blogging platform with key features like Home, About Us, Blog Entries, Contact Us, and options to create new posts. It allows users to submit new blog entries, view detailed posts, and send messages directly through the website interface. The goal is to make the website more interactive, and dynamic by incorporating database operations and server-side logic to handle user inputs.

Turning a Static Website into a Dynamic Blog with Django

A static website is essentially a collection of fixed content that doesn't change unless manually edited by a developer. To add interactivity, user-generated content, and data handling capabilities, the static website is transformed into a dynamic one. In this project, the static website "Stand Blog" is converted into a dynamic version using the Django framework, which allows for more functionality.

Steps Taken to Convert the Website

1. Integrating Django Framework: The original static website is a simple HTML, CSS, and JS template. Django Framework is used to manage server-side operations, effectively adding a backend to handle user requests, data processing, and response generation.

   Steps to integrate Django framework:

    python --version
    pip install django
   

   Setup Django project Standblog

    django-admin startproject Standblog
    django-admin startapp blog
   

   Create a Django App

    django-admin startapp blog
   

   Now inside project Standblog, in settings.py add app name blog and in STATIC_URL add static file location .

   Create a static folder in the blog directory for CSS/JS/images.

   

2. 

   

   Create templates folder, inside template folder create another folder with app name for us it will be blog , here write HTML pages of each feature like Home, About Us, Blog Entries, Contact Us, and options to create new posts to render when user click on particular feature.

   

   Now in views.py set logic handling of the project by defining upon call of which function what to render/what action to perform.

   

   Now in urls.py of blog directory set routes. URLs map browser requests to views in your Django project. Configure a URL pattern to route requests with paths such as /blog, /contact, and /post_create to allow users to navigate between pages and interact with the website. The views then handles these requests by processing the input, performing database operations, and rendering the appropriate HTML templates with updated content.

   Set in project Standblog, set urls.py of app blog.

   

   

3. Database Integration: A core step in making the website dynamic is connecting it to a database. In this case, Django's default database models were utilized to create tables for storing blog posts and messages.In models.py, Blog and Message models were defined to represent attributes and it’s data types, enabling the storage and retrieval of user-submitted information.

   

4. Form Handling and User Interaction: Django forms were integrated into the site to handle user inputs for creating new blog posts and submitting messages through the contact page. The forms take data from users, validate it, and store it in the database using the models. For example, the save_post and save_message views handle form submissions, saving the provided data into the respective database tables.

   

5. Create Admin panel : Django framework provides a built-in admin panel that simplifies managing your application's data. Register your model in blog/admin.py Then apply database migrations using below commands.

   

    python manage.py makemigrations
    python manage.py migrate
   

   Now run the development server .

     python manage.py runserver.
    http://127.0.0.1:8000
   

   Conclusion

   Now, we’ve successfully built a dynamic website using Django. In this tutorial, we covered the basics of setting up a Django project, defining models, creating views and templates, configuring URLs, and running the development server. With Django’s powerful features and flexibility, we can continue to expand and customize our website to suit our needs.