Line 2: You added a CSRF token through a convenient template tag that Django provides. You need to add this for security reasons if you want to allow your users to submit forms in your Django app.

Lines 6 and 10: You added two HTML attributes to both <button> elements:

name defines what key you’ll use to access the value in your view function. You set this key to "follow" for both buttons.

value defines what value the form will send to your view function under the key name defined in name when you press one of the buttons. You set the value of the Follow button to "follow" and the value of the Unfollow button to "unfollow" .

You won’t see any change on the front end of your web app after adding this code, but the changes are necessary so that Django can forward the user-submitted data to your view logic. You also need the attribute values defined in lines 6 and 10 to distinguish which button the user pressed on the back end.

With all the front-end logic set up in profile.html , you can switch to views.py , where you can pick up the user-submitted data and handle it:

Because of how you set up the form in profile.html , the form will redirect back to the same page, which means that Django will pick up the request with profile() . It works this way because of how you set up your URL configuration. This time, however, Django sends an HTTP POST request that holds the user-submitted data, and you can address this in your code update:

Line 7: You introduce a conditional check to see whether the incoming request to your Django view function is an HTTP POST request. This will only be the case if someone submitted the form on profile.html by clicking either the Follow or Unfollow button.

Line 8: You use the user attribute from Django’s request object, which refers to the currently logged-in user, to access that user’s .profile object and assign it to current_user_profile . You’ll need access to this user’s profile later on to change whom they’re following.

Line 9: You get the user-submitted data from the request.POST dictionary and store it in data . Django puts data in request.POST when a user submits a form with the attribute method="post" .

Line 10: You retrieve the submitted value by accessing the data at the key "follow" , which you defined in your template with the name HTML attribute on your <button> elements.

Lines 11 to 14: You set up a conditional statement that either adds or removes the user profile from the currently logged-in user’s .follows , depending on which button they pressed. The two buttons submit different values for the "follow" data key, which you use to distinguish between the two buttons.

Line 15: You use .save() on current_user_profile to propagate the changes to .follows back to the database.

Finally, after all this conditional action—which Django only executes when the page is called with a POST request from a form submission—you render the same template again. render() will reload the page and correctly display the changed follower list after a button click.

Note: In case you haven’t created profiles for you and your existing users you may run into an RelatedObjectDoesNotExist error when performing the POST request. To prevent this error you can verify that your user has a profile in your profile view: