Ads Development Notes
Data Model
AdUrl (ads/models.py) stores two URLs: ad_url (required banner asset) and company_url (optional landing page). The __str__ representation is the ad URL, so lists in admin show the image source.
Views and Templates
ads.views.adsIndex loads all AdUrl rows and renders them with ads/adsindex.html.- The front page (
date/views.py:index) also pulls AdUrl.objects.all() to display banners globally, so changes here surface across the public site.
Admin Integration
- Admin registers
AdUrl with default settings (ads/admin.py). There is no custom form logic, so any validation or upload handling must happen before saving URLs.
Extending the App
- To support file uploads instead of external URLs, swap the
ad_url field for models.ImageField and update templates to use ad_url.url.
- If rotation or scheduling is required, add datetime fields (e.g.,
start_at, end_at) and filter in adsIndex and the home page query.
- For analytics, add a click-tracking view that redirects to the external URL after recording a metric, and update templates to point to that view.