Django 1.0 Template Development

Scott Newman

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781847195708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

In Detail

Django is a high-level Python web application framework designed to support the rapid development of dynamic websites, web applications, and web services. Getting the most out of its template system allows programmers and designers to easily and efficiently output their content in a flexible, extendable, and maintainable manner.

This book will help you to master the Django template system. Built-in template tags and filters are explained with examples and usage notes, as well as information on building custom tags and filters to extend the system for your needs. You will learn to use inheritance to create modular templates that are easy to maintain. You will learn how to serve multiple templates from within the same Django project, with an example of how to serve different templates for a mobile version of your site without having to change any code in your views. Pagination, internationalization, caching, and customization of the automatic admin application are also covered.

A comprehensive, practical exploration of the usage and customization of Django's template system, including tutorials on pagination, caching, and internationalization.

Approach

This book is designed for readers who learn by doing and employs many examples and screenshots to let the reader dig in and start coding. This book isn't designed to be a reference; instead it has a practical, example-driven approach that teaches you by following along with the examples in the chapters.

When you have completed this book, you will fully understand how the template system works, how to extend it when you have specialized needs, and how to optimize the performance and usability of your content.

Who this book is for

This book is for web developers and template authors who want to fully understand and utilize the Django template system. The reader should have completed the introductory tutorials on the Django project's website and some experience with the framework will be very helpful. Basic knowledge of Python and HTML is assumed.

Django 1.0 Template Development

Scott Newman

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Table of Contents

Django 1.0 Template Development

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code for the book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. An Introduction to the Django Template System

What are templates?

Understanding the need for templates

Overview of the Django template system

Separating code from presentation

Helping designers and developers collaborate

Increasing maintainability

Template syntax

Modularity and reusability

Flexibility

Limitations

Critics of the system

Exploring how Django handles requests

Understanding the template system syntax

Context variable

Variables

Filters

Tags

Comments

Code note: Python dictionaries

How invalid variables are handled

Creating our demo application

Starting our application

Adding templates to our application

Adding variables to the view

Moving the logic into a separate template file

Using template filters

Using template tags to perform logical tests

Adding comments

Summary

2. Views, URLs, and Generic Views

An overview

Creating the application

Create the data model

Create the admin file

Configure the URLs

Add data in the admin application

Mapping URLs to views

Handling unmatched URL patterns

Splitting up the URL configurations

Creating views

Accepting the request object

Responding with an HTTP response

Responding with an exception

Putting the views together

Building the basic view

Cleaning up the error handling

Adding the template files

Adding the template to the view

Creating the list view and template

Using generic views to shorten development time

Simple generic views

Loading a template directly

Redirecting URLs

List/detail generic views

Replacing the list view

Replacing the detail view

Using the other generic views

Comparing views and generic views

Summary

3. Template Context

The context explained

Practicing working with the context

Using locals for prototyping

Adding, changing, and removing items in the context

Using the context values in your templates

Preventing method execution from templates

Handling invalid context variables

Cleaning up the view

Context rendering shortcuts

Using render_to_response()

Using render_to_string()

Context processors

Exploring the default context processors

Auth

Debug

Media

il8n

Configuring your project to use context processors

Configuring your views to use context processors

Using render_to_response with RequestContext

Using the context processors in our project

Writing your own context processor

Summary

4. Using the Built-In Tags and Filters

Built-in filter reference

add

addslashes

capfirst

center

cut

date

default

default_if_none

dictsort

dictsortreversed

divisibleby

escape

escapejs

filesizeformat

first

fix_ampersands

floatformat

force_escape

get_digit

iriencode

join

last

length

length_is

linebreaks

linebreaksbr

linenumbers

ljust

lower

make_list

phone2numeric

pluralize

pprint

random

removetags

rjust

safe

slice

slugify

stringformat

striptags

time

timesince

timeuntil

title

truncatewords

truncatewords_html

unordered_list

upper

urlencode

urlize

urlizetrunc

wordcount

wordwrap

yesno

Built-in tag reference

autoescape

block

comment

cycle

debug

extends

filter

firstof

for

forloop

if

ifchanged

ifequal

ifnotequal

include

load

now

regroup

spaceless

ssi

templatetag

url

widthratio

with

Summary

5. Loading and Inheriting Templates

Configuring the template system

Finding a home for the template files

Working with the template loaders

Loading templates manually

Choosing a template loader

Using the filesystem loader

Using the application directories loader

About the eggs template loader

Using the loaders together

Loading your template files

Setting up the error handling templates

Creating the error templates

Testing the error templates

Breaking templates into reusable pieces

Extending templates with inheritance

Using the block tag

Extending templates

Adding inheritance to the press application

Using multiple block tags

Adding template inheritance to our press release list

Inheriting from multiple child templates

Appending to blocks

Template strategy

Creating content placeholders

Extra JS

Extra style

Extra head content

Extra body tag attributes

Using include files

Using include

Using SSI

Summary

6. Serving Multiple Templates

Considering the different approaches

Serving mobile devices

Adapting content

Setting up our example

Serving printable pages

Creating site themes

Testing the template overrides

Serving different templates by domain name

Serving different sites with the development web server

Redirecting users to the mobile site (optional)

Detecting mobile devices

Writing the middleware

Checking only once

Installing the middleware

Summary

7. Custom Tags and Filters

Examining the built-in tags and filters

Template filters

Template tags

Writing your own template filters

Setting up a test application

Creating a home for our filter library

Template filter syntax

Loading templa...

Table of contents

• Django 1.0 Template Development