I finally got around to constructing the first dynamic part of my web site: a system for me to record what television shows I have watched from their pilot episode. While not designed to be a web app used by the world, I am able to add end edit any series listed. And the list that is there is not exhaustive; it's mostly so I know what shows I am behind in watching.
I started with this app because it was simple. The data schema has no relations so I didn't have to worry about doing any many-to-one relations (but another app I have planned will). Probably the trickiest part was setting a 'sort_on' field for TV titles that start with an article ('A', 'An', and 'The'). I wanted that to be based on the specified title for the series, so I overloaded the __init__() method for the model and set it manually. With a subsequent super() call the model class doesn't know that a required value was computed on the fly.
I did go back on forth on whether to use None values for season/episode to represent that I have watched an entire series, but decided against it. I figured it was better to be able to require a value for those attributes and just have an explicit 'completed' boolean attribute.
And I am not happy with how I am currently handling my templates. I am having a tough time deciding how much should be passed into a template through a view, what should be set through a block in a template, and what should just be a a global variable/filter. A good example of this stuff from Google App Engine's Users API. There are functions to specify login and logout URLs along with functions that return what user is logged in and whether they are an admin.
Right now I explicitly set 'user_is_admin' for my templates through the view to decide if a page should display admin-specific info (e.g. edit links by the names of the TV series). But since what user is logged in and whether they are an admin is a project-side thing I feel like writing a Django context processor to handle this. I could then provide a filter that generated login/logout URLs with default to the current URL (although that would probably require a RequestContext to work). Basically I am still feeling around to find out what the right abstraction level is for templates.
