Django Overview

Django works as a high-level framework to facilitate Murmur’s backend web development. It’s divided into a series of files, each responsible for a specific sector of the website development. Most of the main files can be found under browser, engine, and http handler. The main base of Murmur’s code lies in the main.py file, which can be found within engine. Said file accounts for the majority of the website’s functions and requests, such as creating groups, adding mailing lists, adding members, etc.

Django works through a “Model View Template”: HTTP requests are invoked by web interfaces of Murmur which then invoke functions according to the urls.py file, and are then processed by our views.py file, which sends in an appropriate HTTP response. Our main.py file stores Murmur’s data and data structures and is used to populate the HTML templates that are issued after a request. In Murmur’s structure, these data requests include fetching the groups lists, the group information pages, the member tables, etc. The models included in our code are tags, posts, threads, attachment, groups, lists, profiles, etc.

When finding a specific function in a specific file, it is ideal to start at urls.py to find the request responsible, and part from there.