Now that your development environment is running, let's create a solid project structure that will support all the features we're building. Good architecture from the start prevents headaches later.
Understanding Django's App Philosophy
Django follows a modular approach where your project is divided into smaller, focused applications. Think of your entire social media platform as a shopping mall, and each Django app as a specialized store within that mall.
Just like a mall has a clothing store, electronics store, and food court - each serving a specific purpose - our social media platform will have seperate apps for user management, posts, social connections, and more. This seperation makes the codebase easier to understand, maintain, and scale.
Our Social Media Project Structure
Here's how we'll organize our entire platform:
social_media_backend/
├── core/ # Project configuration hub
├── accounts/ # User management & authentication
├── posts/ # Content creation & interactions
├── connections/ # Social relationships
├── groups/ # Community features
├── stories/ # 24-hour ephemeral content
├── notifications/ # Real-time alerts
├── static/ # CSS, JS, images
├── media/ # User uploaded files
├── templates/ # Email templates
├── requirements.txt
├── docker-compose.yml
└── manage.py
Core Directory: The Control Center
The core directory is your project's headquarters. It contains all the global settings and configurations that affect every part of your application. This is where Django was initially created, and it serves as the central nervous system.
Inside core, you'll manage database connections, security settings, third-party integrations, and URL routing. When you need to add a new feature that affects the entire platform - like enabling CORS for API access or configuring Redis for caching - you'll do it here.
The core directory also handles ASGI configuration for WebSocket support (real-time notifications) and Celery setup for background tasks (sending emails, processing images). These are platform-wide services that multiple apps will use.
Accounts App: User Foundation
The accounts app is the foundation of your social media platform. Every other feature depends on having users who can register, log in, and manage their profiles.
This app handles user registration with email verification, secure login/logout processes, password reset functionality, and profile management. It also includes advanced security features like two-factor authentication and login attempt monitoring.
User profile are more than just basic information. They include privacy settings, notification preferences, profile picture, cover photos, and biographical information. The accounts app ensures all this personal data handles securely and efficiently.
Posts App: Conent Engine
The posts app manages all content creation and interaction on your platform. This is where users share their thoughts, photos, videos, and engage with others' content.
Posts can contain text, multiple images, videos, and hashtags. The app handles media upload processing, hashtag parsing and storage, and conetent moderation hooks. It also manages all the interactions - like, comments, shares, and reactions.
The comments system supports nested replies, creating threaded conversations. Users can react to both posts and comments with various emotions (like, love, laugh, angry, sad), and the app tracks all these interactions for analytics and feed algorithm.
Connections App: Social Graph
The connections app builds the social fabric of your platform. It manages the relationships between users - who's friends with whom, who follows whom, and who has blockes whom.
This app handles friend requests with accept/decline functionality, asymmetric following relationships (like Twitter), and blocking for user safety. It also manages privacy controls, determining who can see posts, send messages, or view profiles based on connection status.
The social graph created by this app powers features like friend suggestions, mutual friend counts, and personalized content feeds. It's the backbone that makes your platform truly "social".
Groups App: Community Spaces
The groups app creates space where users can gather around shared interests. Groups can be public (anyone can join), private (invitation required), or secret (hidden from search).
Each group has its own posting area, member management system, and moderation tools. Group administrators can manage membership, assign moderator roles, and control group settings. Members can create group-specific posts, events, and discussions.
Groups also support different post types, file sharing, and announcement systems. The app tracks member activity and engagement to help group administrators understanding their community's health.
Stories App: Ephemeral Content
The Stories app handles temporary content that disappears after 24 hours, similar to Instagram Stories or Snapchat. This creates a more casual, spontaneous sharing environment alongside permanent posts.
Stories support photos, videos, and text overlays. Users can see who viewed their stories, react with quick emoji responses, and save important stories as highlights. The app automatically handles cleaning of expired content and manages view tracking analytics.
Privacy controls let users choose who can see their stories - everyone, friends only, or specific lists. The app also handles story notifications and the circular profile indicators that show when someone has new stories to view.
Notifications App: Real-Time Communication
The notifications app keeps users engaged by alerting them to relevant activity. It handles both immediate WebSocket notifications for real-time updates and persistent storage for notification history.
Every social interaction triggers appropriate notifications - new followers, post likes, comments, friend requests, group invitations, and story views. The app manages notification preferences, allowing users to control what they want to be alerted about.
The real-time aspect uses Django Channels and WebSockets to push notifications instantly to connected users. The app also handles push notifications for mobile apps and email notifications for important events.
How Everything Connects
While each app is independent, they work together seamlessly to create the complete social media experience. The connections between apps are carefully designed to maintain clean architecture while enabling rich functionality.
Database relationships link data across apps - posts have authors from the accounts app, groups have members from the accounts app, and notifications reference objects from multiple apps. Django's ORM handles these cross-app relationships naturally.
Signal-based communication keeps apps loosely coupled. When someone creates a post, the posts app sends a signal that the notifications app listens for, automatically creating notifications for followers without the posts app needing to know about notifications.
Shared utilities are placed in the core directory or separate utility modules. Things like image processing , email sending, and API response formatting are used by multiple apps but defined centrally to avoid duplication.
Development Benefits
This modular structure provides several key advantages that become more valuable as your project grows:
Parallel development allows multiple developers to work on different features simultaneously without conflicts. One person can work on user authentication while another builds the posting system, and third implements real-time notifications.
Easier debugging means when something breaks, you know exatly where to look. Post creation issues? Check the posts app. Notificaiton problems? Look in the notification app. This focused approach saves debugging time and reduces confusion.
Scalable architecture supports growth. Need to add a video calling? Create a new app. Want marketplace functionality? Add another app. The modular structure makes expansion natural and organized.
Testing isolation allows each app to be tested independently. You can be confident that changes to the stories app won't break the posts app if both have comprehensive tests. This isolation makes the entire system more reliable.
Configuration Management
All apps share common configuration through the core settings, but each can have app-specific settings when needed. Database connections, security settings, and third-party service configurations are centralized for consistency.
The settings system supports different environments (development, staging, production) while maintatining the same app structure. Environment variables control sensitive settings like database passwords and API keys without changing the code.
Static files (CSS, JavaScript) and media files (user uploads) are handled consistently across all apps through shared configuration. This ensures a uniform approach to asset management throughout the platform.
URL Organization
The URL structure reflects the app organization, creating intuitive API endpoints:
-
/api/accounts/: User registration, login, profiles -
/api/posts/: Content creation, viewing, interaction -
api/connections/: Friend requests, following, blocking -
api/groups/: Group management, membership, posts -
api/stories/: Story creation, viewing, reactions -
api/notifications/: Notification history, preferences
This consistent structure makes the API self-documenting and easier for frontend developers to understand and use.
What We're Building Next
With our solid architecture in place, Part 4 will dive into the accounts app and development:
User registration system with email verification, secure password handling, and account activation workflows that prevent spam and ensure valid user accounts
JWT authentication for stateless API access that scales across multiple servers and provides secure token-based authentication for both web and mobile clients.
Profile management allowing users to customize their presence with photos, biographical information, privacy settings, and notification preferences.
Two-factor authentication adding an extra security layer with time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) for enhanced account protection.
Password security including secure reset flows, strength requirements, and protection against common attacks like brute force attempts.
The accounts app will become the foundation that every other feature builds upon, so we'll implement it with security, scalability, and user experiences as top priorities.
Questions About Architecture?
Understanding this structure is crucial for everything we'll build. Common questions I see:
Why not put everything in one big app? As features grow, a single app becomes unwieldy and hard to maintain.
How do apps communicate securely? Django's built-in system handle cross-app relationships safely and efficiently.
Can apps be reused in other projects? YES!! Well-designed apps can often be extracted and reused.
What if I need to change the structure later? Django provides tool for refactoring, but starting with good structure save significant time.
Drop your architecture questions in the comments! Getting this foundation right will make building features much smoother.
Ready to implement user authentication? React with 🔐 and let me know if this structure makes sense for our social media platform!
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