To manage the website content in a flexible way it's practical to have some portions of some
pages generated from variables created as FlatPages.
For example, in a frontpage I have a "featured item" section which renders a flatpage variable.
def frontpage(request):
fp = FlatPage.objects.get(url='featured')
return render_to_response('frontpage.html', {'fp':fp })
then in the template
...<div id="featured">{{ fp.content }}</div> ...
But sometimes it would also be nice to put some template tags inside those flatpages.
Django does not seem to provide a tag for such task (most probably because it can be a bad idea
from the security point of view), but the ssi tag does exactly the same thing for files in the
filesystem. Based on ssi, the code bellow defines a new tag that includes the content of
a variable as a template.
def do_templatevar(parser, token):
bits = token.contents.split()
if len(bits) != 2:
raise TemplateSyntaxError, "%s tag takes one argument" % bits[0]
return TemplateVarNode(parser.compile_filter(bits[1]))
register.tag('templatevar', do_templatevar)
class TemplateVarNode(Node):
def __init__(self, content):
self.content = content
def render(self, context):
content = self.content.resolve(context)
try:
t = Template(content)
return t.render(context)
except TemplateSyntaxError, e:
if settings.DEBUG:
return "[Included template had syntax error: %s]" % e
else:
return '' # Fail silently
Now I can put the following code in my flat page
<p>This is my media_url: {{ MEDIA_URL }}</p>
And it will work if I define my template as
...<div id="featured">{% templatevar fp.content %}</div> ...
A last remark to mention databasetemplateloader
that allows to load template data from the database. I never tried it, but seems to be a more generic solution (and also
a way to have a Zope 1 experience in Django).
