Building a Headless CMS with Django Workshop
Join us Monday September 9th for a Web Geeks Dojo on Django. This is a perfect opportunity to learn a new framework for web development. You’ll want to bring a laptop or a friend with a laptop. If you don’t have either don’t fret — our community is welcoming to all and always willing to help.
In this workshop, we will build API endpoints and template pages for user consumption using Django. At the end of our group work, we will have two REST URL endpoints built for client-side consumption and several HTML templates to present a human-readable format. This demonstrates the potential for Django to be used as both as a headless CMS and or a traditional fullstack CMS.
Prerequisites
(show up a bit early and we can help with this as well)Resources for Prereq (Python 3+ installed and a virtual environment with Django 2+ installed):
Simple Pipenv Setup with Django
How To Install Python and Pipenv with Django
Workshop Material
If you can’t get prerequisites setup or don’t have a computer – no worries! We plan to implement pairing in this workshop and will pair you with someone who has the appropriate technology setup.
Django, a high-level Python web framework, with the powerful toolkit Django Rest Framework (DRF), allows for the quick and simple API development that we will be doing. We’ll start by building our models, views, and serializers. We will investigate these objects in the python shell and check out the Django Admin, which offers great potential as a CMS. We will also plug in our models through views to HTML templates. After working as a group on our first model/URL endpoint, attendees can troubleshoot issues, take a stab at building their own project, or continue with the tutorial two directions: building an additional model/URL endpoint or investigate deploying our project onto Heroku.
About the Speaker
Michael Leners is a software developer who transitioned from a career in science and engineering. Michael enjoys fun and games, but gets the biggest thrill in life from collaborative learning and teaching. He is an advocate for minorities in STEM and loves to dance. Originally from just outside of Seattle, Mike moved to Iowa for graduate school where he did research on photonic sensors, after studying bacteria as an undergrad. He taught physics at Grand View University before transitioning to web development. The tech stack for this presentation is inspired by the development process he learned while working at IMT Group’s Computer Service Dev Team. While enjoying the tech and team at IMT, he has chosen to pursue other adventures with Source Allies.
About the Venue
the Forge, by Pillar Technology is a technology consulting company with over 20 years of uncovering and executing industry-disrupting opportunities at lightning speed.
About Our Sponsors
Shift Interactive will be providing food tonight. Shift is a web and mobile software development company based in West Des Moines. Comprised of about 25 strong that includes: UI designers, front-end developers, software engineers, mobile developers, project managers and more. Partner with a variety of clients - locally, nationally and even globally – to create custom tech solutions of all sizes ranging from company websites and mobile apps to SaaS platforms and IoT applications. Shift is always looking for new talent. Connect with them on Twitter, or Facebook
When:
Mon, Sep 9th @ 6:30pm
Where:
the Forge
The Forge by Pillar Technology
1420 Locust Street
Des Moines, IA 50309