Today app

Now let's create another app called today. It will tell us what date it is, what day it is and and greeting based on the time of the day.

Step 1: Create our app:

django-admin startapp today

Install the app in our main Django project. Go to myWebApp/settings.py and include today in the installed app list.

Register the url: Go to myWebApp/urls.py and include the following path:

path('today/', include("today.urls")),

However, our today.urls does not exist yet. so create today/urls.py and put the following content:

from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.index, name='index'),
]

Create the views Go to today/views.py and write the following index function:

from django.shortcuts import render
import datetime

def index(request):
    """Today app index"""

    t = datetime.datetime.now()

    if (t.hour < 12):
        greet_message = "Good morning!"
    elif (t.hour < 18):
        greet_message = "Good afternoon!"
    elif (t.hour < 21):
        greet_message = "Good evening!"
    else:
        greet_message = "Good night!"

    date_message = "Today's date: " + str(t.day) + "/" + str(t.month) + "/" + \
            str(t.year)

    if (t.weekday == 1):
        day_message = "Today is Monday."
    elif (t.weekday == 2):
        day_message = "Today is Tuesday."
    elif (t.weekday == 3):
        day_message = "Today is Wednesday."
    elif (t.weekday == 4):
        day_message = "Today is Thursday."
    elif (t.weekday == 5):
        day_message = "Today is Friday."
    elif (t.weekday == 6):
        day_message = "Today is Saturday."
    else:
        day_message = "Today is Sunday."

    return render(request, "today/index.html", {
        "greet_message": greet_message,
        "date_message": date_message,
        "day_message": day_message
        })

Create webpage: Create the template directory and index page:

mkdir -p today/templates/today
vi today/templates/today/index.html

Let's put following content:

<html>
        <head>
                <title>Today app</title>
        </head>
        <body>
                <p>{{ greet_message }}</p>
                <p>{{ date_message }}</p>
                <p>{{ day_message }}</p>
        </body>
</html>

Now we can runserver and visit localhost:8000/today

python3 manage.py runserver

Now we get the idea. We can use any python logic to populate our html page.

Handling static files

Let's say we want to style the webpage with css. Django convention is to create a directory: today/static/today/ and put our styles.css there.

html {
        font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
        color: darkblue;
        text-align: center;
}

p {
        font-size: 2em;
}

Now let's go to our today/templates/today/index.html, load the static file and add the stylesheet in our head section:

{% load static %}
<html>
        <head>
                <link rel="stylesheet" href={% static 'today/styles.css' %}>
                <title>Today app</title>
        </head>
        <body>
                <p>{{ greet_message }}</p>
                <p>{{ date_message }}</p>
                <p>{{ day_message }}</p>
        </body>
</html>

Handling static files​

Handling static files