Hi Djangonauts, I'm just back from my second year of teaching Django to absolute beginners. The course is a combination of HTML, CSS, Python, and Django, and after five days of coding they have a real live website that they can show to friends. It's always such a great experience to see the look in their eyes when they finally understand how they can tame Django to do what they want.
There's one big thing that keeps tripping them up is urls.py. When specifying URL:s I get lots of questions about the regexes that they have to specify. First: there's a strange "r" in front of each line: r"regex". That means I will have to explain string escaping to them. Then there's the "^" and "$" signs, both which requires explaining regular expressions at length. Then there's [0-9]+ and finally there's the parenthesis around the regex. All in all, looking at URLs from a beginners perspective, they are a bunch of hieroglyphs, and very hard for beginners to grasp right away. I'm not suggesting that urls.py are changed for most users, I'm suggesting that *simple_url* method (name inspired by simple_tag) is added to django.conf.urls that new users can use to get started quickly. This means that most beginners can postpone learning regexes a couple of months. The exact syntax that simple_url takes isn't important to me, as long it's a lot more beginner friendly than what we have today: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/http/urls/#example Just to get the ideas flowing, here's a suggestion, inspired by rails (again, exact syntax isn't important to me, simplicity to beginners is, so feel free to suggest something else if you agree that this is an important issue): from django.conf.urls import simple_url from . import views urlpatterns = [ simple_url('articles/2003/', views.special_case_2003), simple_url('articles/:year)/', views.year_archive), simple_url('articles/:year/:month/', views.month_archive), simple_url('articles/:year/:month/:day/', views.article_detail), ] All parameters would be passed to the view as keyword parameters with the name given and as a string, and validation would happen there instead. I'm thinking there should be no settings with simple_url, and that any more advanced use-case should switch to using url instead. Two questions: A) What do you think about the prospect of simplifying urls.py for beginners? B) What do you think about the specific suggestion to mimic Rails urls with a simple_url tag? Thanks for reading! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/3d002c25-9d98-49b1-b84c-55bc39c6a0f9%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
