During its 2013 spring cleaning, Google decided to discontinue its Reader service. Google Reader is (or was when you’ll read this) an aggregator of content served by Web Feeds. Wildly used, its main feature is to provide a web page so you can access your content from anywhere. It also provides some APIs.

Since then, you may be looking for another tool. Wouldn’t it be a good time to get your independence. If you can host a web server, what about creating your own private aggregator ? This is a good practical case to learn Django, and a little different than the usual blog tutorials.

How can this tutorial help you ?

This tutorial is focusing on the final product, or rather, the initial idea. It is written for developers who would want to add a feature. So each post is closer to a user story in which I will show you how Django can help you.

With this user-story approach, mistakes will be made, and that is the purpose. In the real world, we don’t have the perfect feature from the first draft. We make mistakes because of our lack of knowledge or because once delivered, we figure out that this is not what the user needed. Reviewing a feature is also a important step.

So, if you just want to learn the framework, the official Django tutorial is the best place to go. If you want to lern how to use Django in a development process, I expect this one to be the best.

Tutorial content

The entire tutorial is a set of posts you can discover one after the other. Here is the list:

• Gather your tools. Because we do need some tools after all.
• Create your project, where you should learn what are project and applications.
• Create your first model, where you should have a glimpse of how Django manage it as we set our first user story.
• Activate your first form, where you see what the admin built-in application can provide. This is also the completion of the first user story, and 3 more.
• Modify your model, and the consequences…
• Create a welcome page, and how to deal with 404.

Aside of the tutorial, there are some posts of interest like how to use Eclipse with Django.

Who is this tutorial for ?

The first target audience is those who don’t have any knowledge about Django. If you do but look for specific information, just jump to the corresponding post. Basic knowledge in Python is still mandatory, if you haven’t, just go trough the Python Tutorial.

Source code availability

The source code will be available.