Finally, let's implement our product model. We will start with a very basic set of fields that represent common and shared properties amongst all the products we're likely to sell. Things like a picture of the item, its name, a short description, and pricing information.

class Product(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=300)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=150)
    description = models.TextField()
    photo = models.ImageField(upload_to='product_photo',
                              blank=True)
    manufacturer = models.CharField(max_length=300,
                                    blank=True)
    price_in_dollars = models.DecimalField(max_digits=6,
                                           decimal_places=2)

Most e-commerce applications will need to capture many additional details about their products. We will add the ability to create arbitrary sets of attributes and add them as details to our products later in this chapter. For now, let's assume that these six fields are sufficient.

A few notes about this model: first, we have used a DecimalField to represent the product's price. Django makes it relatively simple to implement a custom field and such a field may be appropriate here. But for now we'll keep it simple and use a plain and built-in DecimalField to represent currency values.

Notice, too, the way we're storing the manufacturer information as a plain CharField. Depending on your application, it may be beneficial to build a Manufacturer model and convert this field to a ForeignKey. We will explore more issues like this later in the book, but for now we'll keep it simple.

Lastly, you may have realized by now that there is no connection to a Catalog model, either by a ForeignKey or ManyToManyField. Earlier we discussed the placement of this field in terms of whether it belonged to the Catalog or in the Product model and decided, for several reasons, that the Product was the better place. We will be adding a ForeignKey to our Product model, but not directly to the Catalog. In order to support categorization of products within a catalog, we will be creating a new model in the next section and using that as the connection point for our products.