The shapeEditor.shared application will hold the core database tables and Python modules we use throughout the system. Let's go ahead and create this application now. Use the cd command to change the current directory to the top-level shapeEditor directory and type the following:

python manage.py startapp shared

This will create a new Python package named shared that will hold the contents of the shared app. Note that, by default, a new application is placed in the topmost shapeEditor directory. This means you can import this application into your Python program like this:

import shared

Django's conventions say that applications in the topmost directory (or anywhere else in your Python path) are intended to be reusable—that is, you can take that application and use it in a different project. The applications we're defining here aren't like that; they can only work as part of the shapeEditor project, and we would like to be able to import them like this:

import shapeEditor.shared

To allow this, you have to move the newly-created shared package directory inside the shapeEditor project's subdirectory. Doing this from the command line is easy; simply cd into the outermost shapeEditor directory and type the following command:

mv shared shapeEditor

Alternatively, if you are running MS Windows, you should use the following command:

move shared shapeEditor

Inside the shapeEditor.shared package directory will be a number of files:

Go ahead and delete the tests.py and views.py modules, as we won't be using them for this application. You should end up with the following directory structure:

Since we have created the application itself, let's add it to our project. Edit the settings.py file again, and add the following entry to the INSTALLED_APPS list:

'shapeEditor.shared',

Now that we have our shapeEditor.shared application, let's start to put some useful things into it.