Python Django Time Hut 2

timehut is a django website that display my kiddos’ images and videos and text. This is a blog that notes why I’m building this and what other things that I’m still looking into in order to add more features to this website.

Here’s a small story why I’m building this website _(Not launched yet)_. My wife has been putting a lot of effort in storing our kids’ photos and videos in an mobile app called Peekaboo (Time Hut), which I believe it’s a great place to preserve all the memories. The app also make it very user-friendly for user to view those images and videos via time-stamped catalog.

Even though it’s fairly easy to upload the images and videos plus inputting the text to describe the context of the images, there’s no way for parents to backup those assets to local machine. So that inspired and motivate me to make a scraper to do so.

Those assets are saved in the database. In order to provide a way for me or my wife to browse the assets, that’s why we have this timehut website using django website.

Now, below is more of a memorandum regarding what other features can be added to the existing one.

Using the authentication framework
Creating user registration views
Extending the User model with a custome profile model
Adding social authentication with python-social-auth

Auth framework consists of the django.contrib.auth application and the following two middleware classes found in the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting of your project:

AuthenticationMiddleware: Associates users with requests using sessions
SessionMiddleware: Handles the current session across requests

The authentication framework also includes the following models:
User: A user model with basic fields; the main fields of this model are: username, password, email, first_name, last_name, and is_active.
Group: A group model to categorize users.
Permission: Flags to perform certain actions.”

Using Django authentication views

Django provides the following views to deal with authentication:

login: Handles a log in form and logs in a user
logout: Logs out a user
- If you enable auth.views for both frontend user and backedn administrator, then you need to do some twist to make sure the login/logout views are separated.
logout_then_login: Logs out a user and redirects him to the log-in page

Django provides the following views to handle password changes:

password_change: Handles a form to change user password
password_change_done: The success page shown to the user after changing his password

Django also includes the following views to allow users to reset their password:

password_reset: Allows the user to reset his password. It generates a one-time use link with a token and sends it to the user’s e-mail account.
password_reset_done: Shows the user that the e-mail to reset his password has been sent to his e-mail account.
password_reset_confirm: Lets the user set a new password.
password_reset_complete: The success page shown to the user after he resets their password.”

User registration and user profiles

Extending the User model

Extending the User model
Using a custom User model
Using the message framework

Using a custom User model

Django also offers a way to substitute the whole User model with your own custom model. Your user class should inherit from Django’s AbstractUser class, which provides the full implementation of the default user as an abstract model.

Using the messages framework/middleware

messages is default Django middleware, and can be imported by using:

1 2	from django.contrib import messages messages.error(request, 'Something went wrong')

success(): Success messages to display after an action was successful
info(): Informational messages
warning(): Something has not yet failed but may fail imminently
error(): An action was not successful or something failed
debug(): Debug messages that will be removed or ignored in a production environment

Building a custom authentication backend

The AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting includes the list of authentication backends for your project. By default, this setting is set to the following:

('django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',)

The default ModelBackend authenticates users against the database using the User model of django.contrib.auth. This will suit most of your projects. However, you can create custom backend to authenticate your user against other sources like a LDAP directory or any other system.

An authentication backend is a class provides the following:

authenticate(): Takes user credentials as parameters. Has to return True if the user has been successfully authenticated, or False otherwise.
get_user(): Takes a user ID parameter and has to return a User object.

Building a Social Website

Creating a social website project