pretty and seo friendly urls in django

Question

I am currently writing a web-blog, learning django. I need a view to display a single blog-post and my first try was to create a url for it like the following:

myblog.com/blog/view/1

This uses the blog-id to identify the specified blog-post.

Now if you look at many blogs/website, you see that they use the title of a blog-post in the url, this is because this is more search-engine friendly, so it can be easier found. This might look like this.

myblog.com/blog/view/a-python-backup-script

How do I implement this in django?

Bonus Question: A lot of sites also include the month and the year of a post. I guess this has also to do with SEO, but how exactly is that useful?

Answer 1

Add a slug field to your Blog model.

from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify

Class Blog(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=40)
    slug = models.SlugField(_('slug'), max_length=60, blank=True)

    #Then override models save method:
    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if not self.id:
            #Only set the slug when the object is created.
            self.slug = slugify(self.title) #Or whatever you want the slug to use
        super(Blog, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

In your urls.py

(r'^blog/view/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$', 'app.views.blog_view'),

In views.py

def blog_view(request, slug):
    blog = Blog.objects.get(slug=slug)
    #Then do whatever you want

EDIT: I added a check in the save method since you want the slug to be created when the object is created. It shouldn't be saved everytime.