Creating Django Links

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, in this video, I want to talk about links.
• 00:06 And if you're familiar with HTML, you know how to create a simple link for
• 00:09 a web page, we're going to go through it.
• 00:11 But Django has sort of different types of links, and
• 00:14 they handle links a little bit differently.
• 00:17 And that's what I want to talk about in this video.
• 00:19 So, let's head over to our base.html file and instead of having
• 00:23 new header stuff just written there, let's create a couple of links.
• 00:28 So I'm going to create a couple of links and
• 00:31 these are just normal HTML links, right?
• 00:34 So it's a href.
• 00:40 Let's go about.
• 00:43 And for this one, we can just put a /, and for
• 00:48 this one we can put about.html.
• 00:51 Now, this points to our home page, which is just the root directory,
• 00:55 which is what this slashes and this one goes to about.html.
• 00:59 And if we look in our urls.py file here,
• 01:03 that's just this and this, think of this as that,
• 01:08 right, with a /, but for here, it has nothing.
• 01:12 So, okay, so let's go ahead and save this and
• 01:15 head back over to our website and hit reload.
• 01:18 And when we do, we see these two links.
• 01:21 Notice I put a little bar between them, that was just this thing right here,
• 01:26 just for aesthetic purposes.
• 01:28 But now we can click on each of these and this one goes to the about page, right,
• 01:32 this is my about page.
• 01:33 And we click this one and it goes back to our homepage,
• 01:36 you notice just the same homepage URL.
• 01:38 Now, this works, right, you can do regular HTML links with Django and
• 01:42 works perfectly fine.
• 01:44 But, django has a better way to do it.
• 01:47 And that's what I really want to show you in this video.
• 01:50 So to use a Django link, it's really, really easy.
• 01:53 We use these same open and closing tags,
• 01:57 but we do it inside of our href tag, right?
• 02:01 So, we just go, Like this, so we have an open tag, and a close tag and
• 02:07 we're going to talk more about these tags starting in the next video.
• 02:11 I've just sort of shown them to you but
• 02:13 haven't really discussed them in a great detail.
• 02:15 We'll talk about them in the next video.
• 02:17 And to use a Django link, you just type in URL,
• 02:21 because we want a URL and then we name it.
• 02:24 So this one is Home.
• 02:25 So where do I get this name?
• 02:28 Or remember back in our urls.py file, we named each of these links.
• 02:33 So you name= home, name= about.
• 02:36 Well, that is the name you put in right here.
• 02:39 So very cool.
• 02:39 So let's come down here to the about page.
• 02:41 Let's do it again here.
• 02:43 And we just want this, want a url, this one is about.
• 02:48 And again, go ahead and save this.
• 02:50 Again, we get this about from our urls.py file the name of this link is about.
• 02:55 If we call this about me,
• 02:59 then this would be about me.
• 03:03 But we didn't do that.
• 03:05 So let's go back here.
• 03:06 Make sure these are both saved.
• 03:08 All right, so now we can come back over here to our web browser and refresh it.
• 03:13 And, you'll notice nothing has changed, really.
• 03:18 These links look the same, they act the same, but now these are Django links.
• 03:22 And in fact, if we view the page source, right click in View Page Source,
• 03:27 we can see these links look exactly like they did when we just created
• 03:32 regular HTML links at the beginning of this video.
• 03:36 That's because Django will convert these tags into links.
• 03:40 Okay, so it kind of begs the question, why do it this way?
• 03:44 It seems like more work to have to enter all these things.
• 03:47 Well, it goes back to what I was talking about with the base study HTML file,
• 03:51 making one change that reflects across your entire website.
• 03:55 So in the future, your links may change, right?
• 03:59 There's a problem with legal department.
• 04:00 They say you can't say about anymore, now it has to be About Me, right?
• 04:05 And so, this has to go to something else and blah, blah, blah, about me.
• 04:10 Well, if you've used HTML links, you have to come in here and
• 04:15 everywhere, you have to update these things, right?
• 04:19 Well, if we've done it this way with Django links,
• 04:22 we could just update this one time.
• 04:24 So instead of about, let's say we want this to now go to about -me.
• 04:31 Right, the actual path of the URL,
• 04:34 we can just make that change right here and save it.
• 04:37 We don't have to make any changes here or anywhere else in our website.
• 04:40 If we have links other places in pages of on our website, we could have hundreds of
• 04:45 links scattered around in the content throughout the website.
• 04:49 We'd have to go through there and change every one of them.
• 04:51 But now, we just make that one change, we can come back here and
• 04:55 hit reload and now when we click About, it goes to aboutme.html, right?
• 05:00 Which looks like a whole new page, but it's not we just changed the URL.
• 05:04 So, that's the reason why you want to use these Django links.
• 05:07 It's just very easy to update them in the future and super important.
• 05:12 I'm actually going to come back here to our urls.py file and
• 05:15 change this just back to about, like it's a little cleaner.
• 05:19 So very cool.
• 05:20 So that's all for links.
• 05:21 Links are very simple.
• 05:22 In the next video, I want to start to talk about these tags and
• 05:26 really kind of get in more depth about them.

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