Update "Django Tutorial Part 2: Creating a skeleton website" page to prevent a bug in "Django Tutorial Part 8: User authentication and permissions"

[LittleBangTheory]

Move the catalog as the first line in the installed app to override default behavior

Description

I moved 'catalog.apps.CatalogConfig', as the first line of INSTALLED_APPS in the setup of the Django skeleton website tutorial, and made the following change in the description just above and below the code section.

Motivation

When implementing the part 8 of the tutorial, I ran into an issue : the logged_out.html page I set up wasn't overriding the default Django page, which meant that when using the log out form in the tutorial, I was sent to the admin console logout page instead of mine.

I found that it was because the order of applications in the settings mattered, so I needed to move my app the top of my list. I hope this change will avoid others the same headache as me !

English is not my first language, so my apologies if there are any mistakes in the way I rewrote the description :)

Additional details

I found the solution here, which is coherent with Django Documentation :

At each stage, Django processes all applications in the order of INSTALLED_APPS.

Related issues and pull requests

None that I could find.

[bsmth]

@hamishwillee - PR here for you to have a look at when you have time 👀

[github-actions]

Preview URLs

• /en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Extensions/Server-side/Django/skeleton_website

[hamishwillee]

@LittleBangTheory Firstly, thank you for posting this issue and for posting a solution as a PR. That makes it much easier to evaluate.

My problem with this is that

1. This tutorial has been around for 6 or 7 years and no one else has reported this problem
2. We have a worked tutorial https://github.com/mdn/django-locallibrary-tutorial/ that works.

So we know that if you follow the instructions properly the code will work.
The bit you are omitting is this one https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Extensions/Server-side/Django/Authentication#template_directory.

It is true that Django looks at INSTALLED_APPS, but that isn't the full story. Django follows this order:

• DIRS (Project-level templates): It iterates through the directories specified in TEMPLATES['DIRS']. If it finds a template with the requested name, it uses that one and stops searching. So in the above link we set this to be our templates, which get found.
• APP_DIRS (App-level templates): If APP_DIRS is True and the template wasn't found in DIRS, Django then checks the templates directory within each application listed in INSTALLED_APPS, in the order they appear. Even though the admin files have some of the same names, I believe the apps are expecting the more specific path.

The admin part of the site will be looking for the more specific path like admin/registration/logged_out and will not be found in the templates you specify.

I don't really want to make this change because while it might be a little "safer", it isn't the right way to manage finding templates. If we did do this we'd have to update the app https://github.com/mdn/django-locallibrary-tutorial and fully test it first.

Therefore I am going to close this. But will reopen if you strongly disagree.

Thank you again for contributing, and apologies for not getting to this earlier.