Hi, I'm Kenneth, and I'm a Python teacher here at Treehouse.

Thanks for joining me for

this course about a small but very useful feature of Django.

Way back, long ago before I was a teacher, I was a full-time Django developer.

One of the biggest projects I worked in, at least in amount of code, was a CMS for

managing apartment websites.

While that product had many different areas like amenities, community maps, and

unit tracking, each of those areas had very similar functionality, creating and

deleting records, for example.

In regular old Python when you find yourself doing the same work over and

over with just light changes you put your code into logical classes

expose some configuration variables and save yourself a lot of work.

But what if you find yourself doing that in Django,

specifically were views are concerned.

Well you saw the title of this course, so

you probably guessed that you make them into classes.

Django two types of class based views.

There's a class that's just named view that you can use to build

class based views.

You can customize this class to your heart's content and

make it do all sorts of amazing things.

There are also a set of views for common use cases that are called generic views.

These generic views handle all of the normal cred operations, creating,

reading, updating and deleting records.

They also handle things like displaying and validating forms,

finding records by date, or automatically performing HTTP redirects.

All of the generic views are built on top of that basic view class too.

So back to my story about the apartment CMS.

We switched over to using class based views and

found that we could create new features in just a fraction of the time.

Things became easier to test too,

because we could test only the special parts of each app.

And review instead of having to check lots of different factors each time.

Of course, this shift wasn't free, there's a time and mental cost for

changing how you build something as numerous as Django.

And Django's class based view inheritance tree isn't the simplest tree ever.

Still though, I feel it's a change well worth the cost and

I haven't built any Django project without class based views in years.

Generic views get me 85% or more of the way to what ever functionality I need and

then I can bring in reasonable customizations to round out that last 15%.

In this course, I want to introduce you to view and some of the more common and

useful views that are built on top of it.

I also want to show you how to customize the views with small classes

in this mix-ins to tweak how your views work so

you get exactly the functionality you need.

Settle in, get your learning had on and come one about Django class based with me.