Question

Disclaimer: i am new to python but have drupal programming experience

I am reading the Definitive Guide to Django (http://www.djangobook.com/en/1.0/chapter07/). After issuing

python manage.py startapp books

python creates the books package with views.py inside. Later in the tutorial, we enter the following into that views.py file:

# Create your forms here.
from django import forms
from django.forms import form_for_model
from models import Publisher

PublisherForm = forms.form_for_model(Publisher) 

TOPIC_CHOICES = (
    ('general', 'General enquiry'),
    ('bug', 'Bug report'),
    ('suggestion', 'Suggestion'),
)

class ContactForm(forms.Form):
    topic = forms.ChoiceField(choices=TOPIC_CHOICES)
    message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea())
    sender = forms.EmailField(required=False)

    def clean_message(self):
        message = self.cleaned_data.get('message', '')
        num_words = len(message.split())
        if num_words < 4:
            raise forms.ValidationError("Not enough words!")
        return

Unless I typed something wrong or misunderstood something (either is likely), we now (seemingly) have a collision between forms (books/forms.py) and django forms. So, which does Python refer to above in

message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea())

Answer 1

This statement:

from django.forms import form_for_model

Really only pulls the name form_for_model into the module-global namespace, the already existing name forms is not affected. Even this:

import django.forms

would not be a problem, because it only makes the name available in its fully-qualified form, django.forms (which is unambigios and does not collide with forms).