Blog Site

The project aims to develop a robust and user-friendly web application using the Django framework. The primary objective is to create a blogging platform that allows users to publish and manage articles on various topics. The application will provide an intuitive interface for authors to compose and format their articles, while also offering a seamless reading experience for visitors.

Key Features

User Registration and Authentication

The application will provide user registration and authentication functionality, allowing individuals to create accounts, log in, and manage their profile information. This feature will enable authors to have personalized accounts and maintain ownership of their published articles.

Article Management

Authors will have the ability to create, edit, and delete articles within the application. The system will offer a user-friendly editor. Additionally, authors will be able to categorize articles by assigning relevant topics to them.

Topic Subscription:

The application will include a subscription feature that allows users to subscribe to topics of interest. By subscribing to specific topics, users will receive notifications or updates whenever new articles are published in those categories. This feature will enhance user engagement and ensure that readers stay informed about the topics they find most valuable.

Overall, the project aims to deliver an efficient blogging platform that caters to both authors and readers. By providing a seamless user experience and incorporating essential functionalities such as user authentication, article management, and topic subscriptions, the application will empower users to create, share, and explore engaging content within a well-structured and organized platform.

Here is a starter repository template, that may helps: Starter template.

Challenge: Functional views

It’s ok not to return actual content for now. Just ensure all the routes are available and provide correct data. Use anything you like to return within HTTP response.

  • /about/: Provides a regular text for a user, describing the functionalities of the django site.

  • /: A site’s homepage. This will contain a list of blogs published via the django site.

  • /<article>/: A single article detail view. The URL contains dynamic part in it. This will be used to fetch a single article from the database.

  • /<article>/comment/: This view will be used to add comments to a article.

  • /create/: A article creation form.

  • /<article>/update/: A view to update an existing article data.

  • /<article>/delete/: A view to confirm article deletion.

  • /topics/: A list of topics available on the site.

  • /topics/<topic>/add/: Add the selected topic to preferred topics list.

  • /topics/<topic>/remove/: Removes the selected topic from preferred.

  • /topics/<topic>/subscribe/: A view to subscribe for a topic.

  • /topics/<topic>/unsubscribe/: A view to unsubscribe from a topic.

  • /profile/<str:username>/: A site user’s personal page.

  • /set-password/: This route will be used to change users’ credential data.

  • /set-userdata/: This route will be user to change users’ data.

  • /deactivate/: Account deactivation (deletion) view.

  • /register/: This view contains a user registration form.

  • /login/: This view contains a login form.

  • /logout/: Logout page. This view should redirect user back to homepage.

Warning

Optional task(s)

  • /archive/<int:year>/<int:month>/: This view provides a list of articles published on a specified month of a specified year. This view should apply date validation and raise Http404 for invalid paths. The valid date is a year’s 4-digits form followed by 1 or 2 digits representing month. Month range should be limited as [1..12], leading zero may be omitted. Valid URLs are:

    /archive/2023/1/
/archive/2023/01/
/archive/2023/10/

Challenge: Data models

Hint

Django admin may be used to create some dummy data. To gather access to admin section you need to create a superuser. The easiest way to do that is to use a django command:

python manage.py createsuperuser

General

  • Each model will be registered for admin site.

Article topic

  • This is a simple model, that contains information about topic:

    • topic title (unique value, 64 characters or fewer)

    • topic short description (255 characters or fewer)

Article

  • Article requires title (255 characters or fewer).

  • Article requires content (at least 255 characters).

  • Creation date should be autogenerated at article creation, and would never be updated.

  • Updated date will be update at each article save.

Article comment

  • Comment requires creation date (autogenerated).

  • Comment requires message text.

Relationships

Note

Standard Django user model will be used for now. To apply model reference pass "auth.User" as related model. Users can be created via admin page. You can also refer the same model as shown below:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from django.conf import settings

UserModel = get_user_model            # option 1
UserModel = settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL  # option 2
UserModel = "auth.User"               # option 3

  • article and topics have many-to-many relationship.

  • article and user have one-to-many relationship. A article can have only one author, but users can create as many articles as they want.

  • article and comment have one-to-many relationship. A article may be a container for many comments, but a comment is related to a single article.

  • comment and user have one-to-many relationship. It’s similar to article - user relationship.

  • topic and user use many-to-many relationship. A single user can prefer none or as many topics as needed and vice versa. This relationship represents topics preferred by a certain blog user. Also this provides an additional option to mark some of preferred topics with a notify flag, to receive newsletters about specified topics updates. The difference between prefer and notify is that preferred topics affect the articles list for a user, and notify is responsible for newsletters for the user.

UML diagram

erDiagram topic { string title string description } article { string title text content date created_at date updated_at } comment { datetime created_at text message } article ||--|{ comment: contains topic }|--o{ article: contains topic }o--o{ user: prefers user }|--|| article: author user }|--|| comment: author

Challenge: ORM

Update existing views to represent entities that are actually stored inside the project’s database.

  • /: should represent a list of existing articles.

  • /<article>/: should represent a single existing article.

  • Detail view should obtain a list of article related comments.

  • /profile/<str:username>/: should contain information about user and a list of articles authored by this user.

  • All views related to a single entity (detail, update, delete, profile) should raise Http404 in case entity could not be fetched.

Hint

It’s common to store dedicated functions/classes that supports some specific business logic in a separate module called services.py or utils.py within an application directory.

Warning

Optional task(s)

  • Create a service to fetch articles, ordered by a specified user preferences. This means, topics preferred by a user affects articles orders. Queryset should be ordered in way, to have articles with most corresponding topics at the begging.

Challenge: Templates

Hint

Helpful link: Bootstrap template

Important

Links related to user data may be placeholders for now.

General

  • All templates should be inherited from the base.html template.

  • Each page has a descriptive title HTML tag, which included | Blog suffix, e.g. “Articles | Blogs”, “Sample | Blog”, “Login | Blog” etc.

  • Each page should contain a link to homepage (/ URL route).

  • Each page contains a list of registered topics. Each view of this kind filters only articles of a relevant topic. This should be implemented with a custom template context processor.

  • Replace content block for about page with some static content.

  • Application-level templates should be located within appropriate applications.

Warning

Optional task(s)

  • Each page should contain a list of links to archive views for the last year.

  • Each page should contain an inclusion-block(s) with following links:

    • /registration/: new user registration form

    • /login/: user login form

    • /create/: article creation page

Articles list

  • Main page contains a list of published articles.

  • Each article entity is rendered using a custom template tag.

  • article template tag renders information about a article object:

    • article title

    • article content (trimmed to ~50 characters)

    • article creation date

    • related topics (3 topics or fewer)

    • number of related comments

Article details

Important

Article update and deletion views would not affect data for now.

  • A article detail page contains links to update or delete current article.

  • Page provides information about article:

    • Article title

    • Creation date

    • Author name

    • Related topics

    • Article content

  • Page contains a list of related comments.

  • Each comment contains:

    • Author name

    • Comment creation time

    • Comment message

Profile page

  • Author page contains information about author:

    • First name

    • Last name

    Add more information, if needed.

  • Author page contains a list of articles created by this author.

  • Author page contains buttons/links to change user data and password or deactivate a user’s account.

Forms

Important

There is no need to add actual forms now. They will be generated by Django. This section describes the final view of these pages. It’s ok just to create a dedicated templates for future use.

  • /register/ page contains a new user registration form. It should take inputs from the user:

    • username

    • email

    • password

    • confirm password

  • /login/ page contains a user login form. It should take the inputs from the user:

    • username

    • password

  • /create/ and /<article>/update/ pages contain a form to collect a article’s data:

    • title

    • relevant topics

    • content

  • /<article>/delete page contains a simple delete confirmation form.

  • Change password form has two fields:

    • new password

    • confirm password

  • Change user’s data form collects all information, that can be changed, e.g. username, first name, last name etc.

  • User preferences page contains a list of available topics. User can mark some topics as preferred. Also for preferred topics an option to subscribe for the newsletters becomes available.

Challenge: Articles’ slugs

Warning

This is an optional challenge in addition to:

  • Update Article model with slug field. The slug value is:

    • required for each article

    • unique for each article

  • Create a data migration to provide slugs for existing articles.

  • slug should be auto-generated on article save. The pattern is article.title-article.created_date, e.g. “Sample article” created at “03/24/2023” should receive slug: sample-article-2023-03-24.

  • Update detail view URL path with article slug as dynamic portion.

Challenge: Auth forms

  • Create form for new users registration with required fields:

    • username

    • email

    • password

    • confirm password

  • username value should be validated against existing values.

  • password and confirm password values should match.

  • Create form for existing users login.

  • Validations errors are to be rendered on the template.

Challenge: Authentication

  • For anonymous users /register/ and /login/ links should be visible in navbar.

  • For authenticated users /logout/ and /create/ links should be visible in navbar.

  • If authenticated user is admin or stuff they should see a link to admin page.

  • /register/: Users should provide all required information about them: desired username and email. Name data (both first and last) is optional. After user creation they should be redirected to login page to perform authentication process. Invalid form should provide information about error(s).

  • /login/: Users should provide their credentials to login. In case login is successful they should be redirected to their profile (if no ?next=url query string available).

  • /create/: Only authenticated users should be able to visit this page. In case anonymous user is trying to request this view they should be redirected to the login view first, and after successful authentication get back to article creation. Then a article is created, it should be authored by the currently authenticated user.

  • /<article>/comment/: Currently authenticated user should be referenced as a comment’s author.

  • Articles may be modified or deleted only by their authors from the detail article page. However, admins can still performs articles actions from the admin page.

  • User related paths are restricted for non-authorized users.

    • /set-password/

    • /set-userdata/

  • POST request /deactivate/ should mark current authenticated user as deleted and log them user.

  • Authenticated users should be able to adjust their preferred topics lists.

  • Authenticated users should be able to subscribe or unsubscribe for a selected topic.

Warning

Optional task(s)

  • Adjust the order of article list according to authenticated user preferences. For anonymous users keep default ordering.

  • Implement account reactivation behavior. The exact workflow does not mater. The sample scenario is to collect email for the user and check it for existing in the database. After that create a request for admin to activate an account and send a confirmation email, when all is done.

Challenge: Article related forms

  • Implement a article form. This form will be used to create new articles and to update existing ones.

  • Each created article should have at least one related topic.

  • Implement a comment form to gather a comment from a user.

  • Only POST requests to /<article>/comment/ are allowed from this moment.

  • Implement functionality:

    • article creation

    • article update

    • article comment (create a related comment)

    • article deletion

  • Only authenticated users can create articles.

  • Article can be edited only by its author.

  • Article can be deleted only by its author.

  • Only authenticated users can comment articles.

Challenge: Class-Based Views

  • Replace all existing views via CBV.

  • Existing functionality should not be corrupted.

Note

It’s ok to use built-in Django CBV if needed.

Challenge: Serializers

Article topic

  • Topic serializer is for read-only purposes only. Topics can be created via admin page only.

  • Serialized data should contain all available data, e.g. pk, title, description.

Article comment

  • article comment serializer can perform both reading and writing operations. But it can’t be used to update or delete comment.

  • Random, or pre-defined user may be used as comment’s author for now. This will be fixed in the future.

Article

  • article serializer provides full access to articles. All operations are available: list, retrieve, create, update and destroy.

User

  • User serializer provides full access to site users data. All operations are available for now: list, retrieve, create, update and destroy. This behavior will be fixed in the future, to prevent unauthorized data modifications.

Challenge: API views

All blog-site functionality are to be mirrored via REST API.

Note

It’s ok to pass pre-defined user as argument in request’s body. This will be fixed in the next challenge.

Challenge: Authentication and Permissions

  • Implement authentication system for REST API.

    • For non-authenticated users it is possible to create a new account

    • For non-authenticated users it is possible to obtain authentication data.

  • Access to user data is restricted. Authorized users can manipulate only their own data (e.g. retrieve, update).

  • Admins can retrieve all users data (list), but can’t change them via REST API. However, it is still possible via admin page.

  • Authorized users can create articles or update and delete articles created by them.

  • Authorized users can add comments to a specified article.

  • Authorized users can adjust their topics preferences.