Comprehensive Django Tutorial: Introduction, MTV Architecture, Project Setup, and Database Integration

This tutorial begins with an overview of web frameworks and introduces Django as a Python‑based backend framework that follows the MTV (Model‑Template‑View) architecture, a variation of the classic MVC pattern.

It explains the roles of the Model (database definitions in models.py), Template (HTML/CSS/JS files), and View (business logic in views.py), and how Django maps URLs to view functions via urls.py.

The guide then walks through installing Python 3.5, pip, and PyCharm Professional, followed by installing Django with pip install django. It shows how to create a new Django project named mysite and a new app called app01 using the IDE or the command line.

After project creation, the tutorial details the automatically generated directory structure, including the project settings, the manage.py utility, and the templates folder for HTML files.

Next, it demonstrates how to define URL patterns in urls.py, write simple view functions in views.py that return a "hello world" string, and run the development server with python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8000. It also notes the need to add the app to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.

The article then introduces static file handling by creating a static directory, configuring it in settings.py, and linking CSS/JS files from the template.

To enable dynamic interaction, a form is added to index.html for user input, and the corresponding view processes the POST data. The tutorial mentions disabling Django’s CSRF protection for simplicity (by setting CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE = False in settings.py).

For dynamic page rendering, it explains using Django’s template language (Jinja2‑style) to inject data into HTML.

Finally, the guide covers database integration: configuring MySQL (or using the default SQLite), creating a model with name and password fields, running python manage.py makemigrations and python manage.py migrate to create tables, and updating views to save and retrieve user data.

By the end of the tutorial, readers have a fully functional Django web application that demonstrates project setup, routing, template rendering, static assets, form handling, and persistent storage.