Developing a Web Application for Project Management with Python and Django

In this post, we are going to discuss how to create a project management application using Python and Django. Django, a high-level Python web framework, follows the model-view-template architectural pattern and encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Setting up Django

To start with, we need to have Python installed in our system. After installing Python, we need to install Django. This can be done using pip, the Python package installer.

pip install django

Once Django is installed, we can create a new Django project. Here is how to do it:

django-admin startproject project_management

Creating a Django application

In Django, a project is a collection of configurations and apps. An app is a module that serves a specific function. To manage our project, we'll create an app within our project.

python manage.py startapp tasks

This command creates a new app named 'tasks'.

Creating a Model

Models in Django represent a database table. We will create a Task model to manage our tasks.

class Task(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    description = models.TextField()
    completed = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

Creating Views

In Django, a view is a type of Web page that takes a request and returns a response. We can create a view to list all tasks.

from django.shortcuts import render
from .models import Task

def task_list(request):
    tasks = Task.objects.all()
    return render(request, 'tasks/task_list.html', {'tasks': tasks})

This view retrieves all tasks from the database and passes them to the 'task_list.html' template.

Creating Templates

A template is a text file that defines the structure or layout of a file (like an HTML page), with placeholders for actual content. We can create a 'task_list.html' template to display our tasks.

<h1>Tasks</h1>
<ul>
{% for task in tasks %}
    <li>{{ task.title }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

URL Mapping

Finally, we need to tell Django to display our view at a certain URL. This is done in the urls.py file.

from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('tasks/', views.task_list, name='task_list'),
]

This tells Django to show the task list when we visit '/tasks/' URL.

Conclusion

This post provides a simple guide on how to build a project management web application using Python and Django. It explains the basic concepts of Django including setting up Django, creating an application, a model, views, templates and URL mapping. By following this guide, you will have a simple project management application ready to be used for managing your projects. Happy coding!