Drop Shipping Online Store on Django / IT4each

1. Introduction. Who is this course for? Preparing the Development Environment

Introduction

This article is a presentation of the new Drop Shipping Store on Django course, where in 7 lessons you will create a full-fledged online store from free materials that are in the public domain, which can trade anything on a dropshipping basis. If anyone is not in the know, then dropshipping is a way of organizing a business in which the seller places on his virtual storefronts goods that he does not have, but which he can receive at any time from his regular supplier. Therefore, the task of the owner of such an online store is to receive an order and payment from the client, and then transfer the information about the order and the received payment to the supplier, minus his commission.

Everything you need to create this online store: programs, necessary training materials and even video tutorials are in the public domain. You just need to carefully follow everything that will be written and shown in the materials for this course.

In this course, we will go through all the stages of creating a new project together:

As mentioned above, all videos that describe in detail (and most importantly, show!) The development process are in the public domain. Therefore, carefully following the recommendations on the screen, you will eventually get the real working code of the entire project. However, for those who are immediately interested in the final result, there is the option of accessing an archived copy of the project after each lesson. This access can be obtained through a small donation here at this link (registration required).

Well, the site itself, which will turn out in the end, can be viewed in the video at the end of this article.

Who is this course for?

For everyone who is interested in web development, regardless of the level of knowledge and experience!

Those who are far from programming and who have been dreaming of their own online store for a long time will be able to get acquainted with the main stages of creating a web project, get an idea of the capabilities of the Django framework and understand the amount of work that is necessary for implementation these possibilities. This will allow, firstly, to formulate the tasks for your own project more accurately and in more detail, and, secondly, to specify the requirements for the contractor to implement these same tasks. This will significantly reduce the time for discussing these tasks with the contractor, and hence the overall costs of the project.

For those who consider themselves to be Familiar with the basics of the Python language this will be a great opportunity to try their hand at creating their own project. Actually, if you don’t know Python yet, then only two courses separate you from this category: Python for beginners and Python Basics. After passing them, you will be able to independently adjust this project for many of your tasks and save the result in your own repository. Well, and what you can’t implement on your own yet, you can order a third-party contractor (including us!). In any case, finalizing a part of the project is not at all the same as doing the project from scratch!

Well, if you are familiar with Python OOP, have already tried your hand at the Django website and created your first Polls application there, then this course will suit you perfectly. Thanks to it, you can independently implement most of the tasks in your application. Well, the execution of that insignificant part of the project, which you cannot do yourself yet, can always be ordered by a specialist. Including us :-).

Preparing the Development Environment

We will be working on a Linux operating system, and as an IDE we will use the Community (free) version of PyCharm. The choice of Linux is not accidental: it is on this OS that all servers that use the Django framework work. Therefore, if you work on Windows, then the best solution would be to additionally install a virtual machine with Linux OS. How to do this is described in detail and shown in these videos:

In addition, we will need somewhere to save checked and debugged versions of our code, and a more convenient place than a repository has not yet been invented for this purpose. Therefore, if you have not yet created an account with SSH access in any repository, then it makes sense to read See this article on our website, which details and shows how to create an account on GutHub and add SSH keys to it.

After carrying out all the above additional preparations, we can finally proceed directly to the creation of the project itself in the following order:

create a virtual environment for our project;
install the Django package on it;
create the project itself;
change the settings.py file responsible for the settings of our project;
add two new applications to the project:
- application responsible for registering and authorizing users (authentication);
- and the application of the online store itself (shop);
make the first migration;
create a superuser;
add to .gitignore .idea for PyCharm;
and "push" everything done to the repository.

After completing all the points of this checklist, we will try to run the project. Hooray - our project is already running! And all that remains for us is to "slightly" modify its functionality!

We go into the admin panel under the login and password as the newly created superuser. As you can see, there are already user and user group models.

We haven't added this structure yet, but it comes by default in Django. Therefore, if desired, we can add the first users for testing even before we authorize users on the site. That is, directly from the admin panel!

The results of all this preparatory work of the current stage, you can find the link at the bottom of the video, which will lead you to the course Drop Shipping Store on Django (RU voice). And, if you have paid for the course, then you can download an archive copy of this stage (that is, what has been done so far) (registration required).

You can learn more about all the details of this stage from this video (RU voice):