w5d4 - More Django, and a capstone project

Django is becoming a little less like magic, and a bit more like a really advanced technology.  To put it another way, I've been working pretty hard on pulling the pieces apart to see why things work.  I know there's some tons of stuff that's entirely beyond me at this point that happens underneath, but I'm at least starting to get a handle on the surface things.

We're still working with a super-simple web store.  Today we split the items with pagination, and added a shopping cart (of sorts - more a bin for holding items we select).  I figured out how to delete things from the cart (adding things was mapped out for us), and how to show a total based on the prices for the individual items.  I also figured out how to add links to all the pages to jump around more easily (not on the program at all, but it seems weird to have a site without internal links.

It all sounds so trivial when written out.  It didn't feel trivial going through it.  It didn't feel trivial, either, when I was going over the code this evening with a friend in the class.  Understanding the properties of the request object, the user object, and the shopping cart object, and how they interact with the product objects...it takes a bit of work.  Frequent use of dir(), command line sqlite3 to keep up with changes, and multiple print statements to monitor the status of the program all helped too.

It's dispiriting at times to think that I'm just 3 weeks from being done, with so much left to do.  Seriously, this stuff feels so minor and inconsequential...but I suppose everyone starts off small and works up.  Hopefully this is the steepest part of the curve....

Regardless, I need to be thinking of a capstone project.  I have a few ideas, but they seam either derivative, or too complex.  We'll see what happens.