What is the meaning of string argument in django model's Field?

Question

Just learning django, I'm reading this tutorial and getting confused at this part:

class Question(models.Model):

    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')

Having searching its documentation, still can't figure out what does 'date published' argument mean? Anyone can explain?

Answer 1

Well here is an example of what human-readable name means.

class Question(models.Model):
    question_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('Enter published date')

So in our admin panel we see our pub_date feild name as Enter published date.

But if you try to fetch data from database you will see the feild name as pub_date.

>>> data_dict = Question.objects.all().values()
>>> data_dict
[{'question_text': u'What is Python?', 'pub_date': datetime.datetime(2014, 11, 22, 12, 23, 42, tzinfo=<UTC>), u'id': 1}]

Answer 2

Because this feature is hard to find in the documentation, I think it's better practice to explicitly use the verbose_name argument, e.g.

class Question(models.Model):
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField(verbose_name='date published')