MVC and django fundamentals

Question

Pretty new to this scene and trying to find some documentation to adopt best practices. We\'re building a fairly large content site which will consist of various media catalogs

Answer 1

first, forget all MVC mantra. it's important to have a good layered structure, but MVC (as defined originally) isn't one, it was a modular structure, where each GUI module is split in these tree submodules. nothing to use on the web here.

in web development, it really pays to have a layered structure, where the most important layer is the storage/modelling one, which came to be called model layer. on top of that, you need a few other layers but they're really not anything like views and controllers in the GUI world.

the Django layers are roughly:

• storage/modelling: models.py, obviously. try to put most of the 'working' concepts there. all the relationships, all the operations should be implemented here.
• dispatching: mostly in urls.py. here you turn your URL scheme into code paths. think of it like a big switch() statement. try hard to have readable URLs, which map into user intentions. it will help a lot to add new functionality, or new ways to do the same things (like an AJAX UI later).
• gathering: mostly the view functions, both yours and the prebuilt generic views. here you simply gather all the from the models to satisfy a user request. in surprisingly many cases, it just have to pick a single model instance, and everything else can be retrieved from relationships. for these URLs, a generic view is enough.
• presentation: the templates. if the view gives you the data you need, it's simple enough to turn it into a webpage. it's here where you'll thank that the model classes have good accessors to get any kind of relevant data from any given instance.