LocalLibrary is the name of the website that we'll create and evolve over the course of this series of tutorials. As you'd expect, the purpose of the website is to provide an online catalog for a small local library, where users can browse available books and manage their accounts.
This example has been carefully chosen because it can scale to show as much or as little detail as we need, and can be used to show off almost any Django feature. More importantly, it allows us to provide a guided path through the most important functionality in the Django web framework:
- In the first few tutorial articles we will define a simple browse-only library that library members can use to find out what books are available. This allows us to explore the operations that are common to almost every website: reading and displaying content from a database.
- As we progress, the library example naturally extends to demonstrate more advanced Django features. For example we can extend the library to allow users to reserve books, and use this to demonstrate how to use forms, and support user authentication.
Even though this is a very extensible example, it's called LocalLibrary for a reason — we're hoping to show the minimum information that will help you get up and running with Django quickly. As a result we'll store information about books, copies of books, authors and other key information. We won't however be storing information about other items a library might store, or provide the infrastructure needed to support multiple library sites or other "big library" features.