daisy-cotton-ext

Extended components and page blocks for django-cotton and daisyUI.

Built on django-cotton and daisyUI. daisy-cotton holds one Cotton component for each daisyUI component. This package holds what is built on top of those, and it comes in two kinds:

• Extended components: single components that go further than their daisyUI counterpart, such as a card with more structure than card gives you.
• Page blocks: whole regions of a public-facing page, such as a hero, ready to drop in.

The blocks came first, and they are what is built so far.

Component libraries in this space cover the application: navigation, forms, tables, dialogs. They stop at the pages that sit in front of it — the landing page, the pricing page, the sign-up pitch. Those get assembled by hand out of raw utility classes, in every project, every time.

Blocks are configured through attributes and take their colours from whatever daisyUI theme the project already runs, so a page built from them re-themes with the rest of the site.

Contents

• Status
• Scope & philosophy
• Requirements
• Install
• Blocks
• Contributing
• Changelog
• License

Status

Version 0.0.1. Twelve families are built: the section and its columns, the heading, heroes, backgrounds, text effects, reveals, quotes, stats, footers, points, sign-in pages and sign-up pages. Nothing here is stable. Block names, attributes and the set of classes the stylesheet emits all change between minor versions, and the CHANGELOG is how a project finds out.

Scope & philosophy

What this is. A presentation-only library of extended components and page blocks. Templates, a stylesheet, and the small amount of JavaScript some blocks need. Blocks are configured through attributes and themed by whatever daisyUI theme the project runs, so a page built from them never pins a literal colour into the markup.

What this deliberately is not.

• Not an application. No models, no views, no forms, no URLs, no migrations. A block's content comes from the template author, never from a queryset.
• Not a CSS framework. No daisyUI plugin, no theme layer, no preflight. Those come from the project.
• Not the base components. A component that maps one-to-one onto a daisyUI component belongs in daisy-cotton. What lives here adds to one or combines several.
• Not application chrome. Navigation, forms, tables and CRUD pages take their content from the application, and they are somebody else's job.
• Not a fixed catalogue. The set of blocks grows as new ones are designed. There is no taxonomy to fill in.
• Not page templates. Blocks only. You pick the ones you want and assemble the page yourself. There is no one-tag landing page.

Tie-breaks. When two of these pull against each other: theme-driven beats hard-coded, a block that composes existing daisyUI markup beats one that invents its own, and leaving a job to the project beats doing it here.

The directions the package works toward are in GOALS.md, and the order they are being built in is in the roadmap.

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• Django 5.2, 6.0 or 6.1
• django-cotton 2.6+
• daisy-cotton 0.1.3+, installed with this package
• daisyUI 5, loaded by the project

daisyUI is a hard requirement and this package does not ship it. Any project already running daisyUI satisfies it, whether through its own Tailwind build or through a package that provides one, such as django-mvp.

Install

pip install daisy-cotton-ext

Add it to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    "django_cotton",
    "daisy_cotton",
    "daisy_cotton_ext",
]

daisy_cotton holds the base components some of these are built from, such as the avatar beside a quotation's name. A project that already has a component of the same name, its own or another package's, keeps it: Django uses the first one it finds in INSTALLED_APPS order. django-mvp ships a <c-section> of its own, a titled section with a toolbar, so a project that uses both packages gets whichever is listed first.

Then load its stylesheet after the one carrying daisyUI:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static 'css/your-daisyui-build.css' %}">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static 'css/daisy-cotton-ext.css' %}">

The two stylesheets do different jobs. Yours carries daisyUI, its themes and Tailwind's preflight. This one carries the plain Tailwind utilities the blocks need and which your build has no way to know about, because it scans your source and these templates live in site-packages.

Every class in this stylesheet is prefixed dce:, as in dce:flex and dce:lg:grid-cols-2, so none of them shares a name with a class in your build and neither stylesheet can override the other's utilities. Link them in the order shown. The other order is tested and works against a Tailwind 4 build, but yours first is the one to rely on.

A class you pass to a block yourself, through its class attribute or inside a slot, is yours and comes from your build. This stylesheet emits nothing unprefixed.

Blocks are then available as Cotton tags:

<c-hero.centred title="Ship it on Friday">
  ...
</c-hero.centred>

Blocks

Section and columns

The outer shell of a region of a page, and the columns inside it. A section always spans the page, and so does its background. container decides how wide the content inside may grow.

Nothing says how many columns a section has. Each <c-section.col> opens one, and they share the width equally unless span says otherwise. Below the lg breakpoint they become one column, in the order written.

<c-section container="wide" reverse class="bg-base-200">
  <c-slot name="background"><c-background.grid /></c-slot>
  <c-slot name="header">
    <c-heading eyebrow="Deploy tracking" title="See which change broke the graph" />
  </c-slot>
  <c-section.col span="2">
    <p>Every deploy is drawn on the same timeline as your error rate.</p>
  </c-section.col>
  <c-section.col span="3">
    <img src="{% static 'img/timeline.png' %}" alt="A deploy marked on an error-rate graph">
  </c-section.col>
</c-section>

<c-section> takes:

<c-section.col> takes:

It has a background slot of its own, which puts a background block behind that column alone.

A section can sit inside another, or inside a column. The inner one adds no gutters and no room above or below, and keeps the copy colour of the section around it, so an outer section can carry a background across the page while an inner one holds the text to narrow.

Columns are for a small, fixed number of parts that stack at one breakpoint. A row of many cards that should go from four across to two to one is a grid, and is not what this is for. The reasoning is in ADR 0011.

Heading

<c-heading> is the three lines that open most sections and heroes: a short line above, the heading, and a sentence under it. Any of them can be left out, and with none it renders nothing.

<c-heading eyebrow="Included in every plan" title="What you get on day one" lead="Nothing here is held back for a larger plan." />

Heroes

Three arrangements and one inline helper. A different arrangement is a different tag rather than an option on one component, so moving a page from one to another is a one-word change.

The three arrangements take the same attributes:

And the same slots. Anything you pass that is not listed above is forwarded to the section element, so id, data- attributes and the rest reach the markup untouched.

Backgrounds

A background is not part of a layout, so it is not part of a block. Each one is its own block that goes in another block's background slot, which means any background composes with any layout.

Six more move. Each one holds still for a reader whose system asks for reduced motion.

An attribute that sets an amount takes a number, and any number works:

The number is written to the layer's style attribute, as a custom property or as opacity. A page served under a content security policy that forbids inline styles ignores it and gets the defaults.

The movement is CSS only. Parallax relies on scroll-driven animation, so in a browser without it the wrapped background stays where it is. It also needs every element between itself and the page to clip with overflow: clip and never overflow: hidden, which the hero blocks do.

Two things to know about them. A background belongs in a background slot and nowhere else, because it positions itself against that slot's wrapper rather than filling its parent in normal flow. And a dark background needs invert on the block, since a background cannot reach up to recolour its sibling. Each block's page says whether it wants one.

<c-hero.centred title="Ship the page, not the CSS"
                lead="Blocks for the pages in front of your app."
                invert>
  <c-slot name="background">
    <c-background.image src="{% static 'img/desk.jpg' %}" dim="0.85" />
  </c-slot>
  <c-slot name="actions">
    <a class="btn btn-primary btn-lg" href="{% url 'signup' %}">Get started</a>
  </c-slot>
</c-hero.centred>

Text effects

A text effect is an inline span around a few words. It goes anywhere words go and takes its size and weight from whatever it sits in, so the heading stays the page's own.

<h1 class="text-5xl font-bold">
  Ship the page, <c-text.gradient>not the CSS</c-text.gradient>
</h1>

Three hold still:

Six move. Each one renders the finished words, holding still, for a reader whose system asks for reduced motion.

The numbers mean the same thing throughout:

On a shimmer, speed is how fast the band travels across the words and frequency is how often it comes round. A crossing never takes longer than the wait between crossings.

Things to know before reaching for one:

• Typewriter and wave take their line as a text attribute, because a template can split a string into letters and cannot split markup. text="{{ title }}" and :text="title" both work.
• Glow and glitch are for a few words on one line. They lay copies of the words over the original, so the phrase does not wrap, and their content should be plain words.
• Gradient, outline and depth are for headings. A palette colour makes no promise of contrast against the page, and large type survives that where a sentence does not.
• Nothing pauses a looping effect. A page that has to meet WCAG 2.2.2 sets repeat on each one, or supplies its own control.
• A screen reader is given the words once, whichever effect is drawing them and however many copies or letters it draws.

The reasoning is in ADR 0005.

Reveals

A reveal wraps content the page already has and brings it in as the reader scrolls to it or points at it. Nothing moves until it is asked to: a page uses a reveal by wrapping something in one.

effect on enter and cascade is one of up, down, left, right, zoom, blur and fade. A direction is the way the content travels, so up rises into place from below. On hover it is slide or cover. from on wipe is left, right, top, bottom or centre.

The other attributes are numbers:

<c-reveal.cascade per="3" class="grid gap-6 md:grid-cols-3">
  <div class="card bg-base-200">…</div>
  <div class="card bg-base-200">…</div>
  <div class="card bg-base-200">…</div>
</c-reveal.cascade>

<c-reveal.hover class="rounded-box" label="Northern ridge, site 14">
  <img src="{% static 'img/ridge.jpg' %}" alt="A ridgeline at dusk" />
  <c-slot name="caption">
    <strong>Northern ridge, site 14</strong>
    <a class="link" href="{% url 'site' 14 %}">Open the record</a>
  </c-slot>
</c-reveal.hover>

Things to know before using one:

• The scroll reveals follow the scroll position. There is no script and no timer, so the movement runs backwards when the page is scrolled back up, and it does not replay.
• Without scroll-driven animation the content is simply there. The same goes for a reader whose system asks for reduced motion. Stack is the exception in the other direction: it is ordinary sticky positioning and works everywhere.
• Clip with overflow: clip, never overflow: hidden, on anything between a reveal and the page. overflow: hidden makes a scroll container, and inside one a scroll reveal never moves and a stacked panel never sticks. left and right start outside the wrapper's box, so their parent usually wants overflow-clip.
• over above 1 can leave the last thing on a page part-way in, because the page runs out of scroll before the arrival finishes.
• Cascade staggers its first twelve children. Any after that arrive with the first.
• Words takes its text as an attribute, not a slot, and splits it on spaces, so it carries plain words and no markup. A word is fainter than body text should be until it is reached, which suits one short, large statement and not body copy.
• Hover is reachable without a mouse. The frame takes keyboard focus and the caption stays open while anything inside it has focus. Where the device has no hover, the caption shows all the time.
• Give each stacked panel a solid surface, or the one underneath shows through.

The reasoning is in ADR 0006.

Quotes

A quote is what somebody said and who said it. Four are components that sit inside a page's own layout, three are blocks that take the full width, and one is the caption the others share.

Every quote but the wall also takes the person: name, role, source, href and src. source is the work the words come from, and href is where it can be read. src is a small portrait, except on split, where it is the picture beside the words.

variant is a colour of the theme: primary, secondary, accent or neutral. It colours the rule on pull, the mark on mark, the filled stars on card and the whole bubble on bubble, which also takes base-100, base-200 and base-300.

<c-quote.pull name="Amara Okafor" role="Head of Platform, Northwind" src="{% static 'img/amara.jpg' %}">
  “Friday afternoon stopped being frightening.”
</c-quote.pull>

<c-quote.wall title="What people say" columns="3">
  <c-quote.card rating="5" name="Mei Tanaka" role="Compliance Lead, Harbour Bank">
    “The audit log answered the question before the auditor had finished asking it.”
  </c-quote.card>
  <c-quote.card rating="4" variant="primary" name="Jonas Lindqvist" source="Fjordline engineering blog" href="https://example.com/blog">
    “Rolling back used to be a meeting. Now it is a button.”
  </c-quote.card>
</c-quote.wall>

Things to know before using one:

• Every quote is a figure holding a blockquote, with a figcaption when there is anybody to name. A quote given no name, role or source has no caption at all.
• Write the quotation marks yourself, except in mark, where the oversized one does that job.
• source is marked up as a citation and the person is not. cite names a work. Given an href, the source becomes a link and the address is recorded on the blockquote.
• The portrait is daisy-cotton's <c-avatar>, at its stock size, with an empty alt because the name sits beside it. The picture on split is different: give it an alt when it shows more than the name says.
• rating is a whole number from 1 to 5. The stars are read out as one thing, “4 out of 5”. Anything else, and there is no row of stars.
• A wall reads down each column, not across. That is what lets long and short quotations sit together without gaps. Put them in a grid when the order across matters.
• Centred and split take a background slot, like the heroes, and invert for a dark one.

The reasoning for building on daisy-cotton's components is in ADR 0007.

Stats

A stat is a figure and what it counts. daisy-cotton's <c-stat> shows a title, a number and a line of description. These add what usually comes next: how the number has moved, how far it is towards a target, an icon beside it, a count up as the visitor reaches it. Eight are stats that go wherever a stat goes, one is the badge they share, and three are blocks that set figures out across a page.

Every single-figure stat also takes title, value and desc, the names <c-stat> uses, and an optional icon.

<c-stat.group>
  <c-stats.trend icon="deploys" title="Deploys a day" value="31" change="12%" desc="since last month" />
  <c-stats.trend title="Median lead time" value="18m" change="26m" direction="down" inverse desc="since the spring" />
  <c-stats.progress title="Raised this quarter" value="€42k" percent="70" desc="of a €60k target" />
</c-stat.group>

<c-stats.band title="A year in numbers" cascade>
  <c-stats.count title="Releases" to="7440" />
  <c-stats.count title="Teams" to="41" />
  <c-stats.count title="Saved a year" to="48" prefix="€" suffix="k" />
</c-stats.band>

Things to know before using one:

• Each single-figure stat is daisy-cotton's <c-stat> with something added, so it goes in a <c-stat.group> beside plain stats.
• The six trend stats take the same attributes. Changing layout is changing the tag.
• direction says which way the figure moved and inverse says a fall is the good news, as it is for a lead time or a failure count. The arrow and a direction read out to a screen reader carry the move. The colour only repeats it.
• icon is a name handed to your project's own <c-icon>, so it draws whichever icon set you already use. Leave it out and there is no icon. Fill the figure slot for a picture or a logo. Corner and row take a small icon only.
• No stat draws a chart. Trend, inline, corner and footer place whatever you put between their tags under the figures, which is where a chart from a charting package goes.
• You format the figures and work out the percentage. value arrives as words. percent is a number from 0 to 100.
• <c-stats.count> counts whole numbers, written without separators. For a large figure, count the leading part and put the rest in suffix: to="12" suffix="k". A screen reader is given the finished number. Under prefers-reduced-motion, and in a browser without scroll-driven animation, so is everyone else.
• Inside a <c-stat.group>, a count runs once as the page loads. A stat group is a scrolling box of its own, and "in view" is measured against the nearest one. Put counting stats in <c-stats.band> or a plain grid for a count that waits.
• Nothing else here moves unless asked. cascade on a band and speed on a headline are both off by default.
• The band takes a background slot, like the heroes, and invert for a dark one.

The reasoning is in ADR 0008 and ADR 0009.

Footers

A footer closes the page: the links the navigation bar has no room for, who the site belongs to, and the small print. Four are blocks, and two are the parts those blocks are made of.

Every block also takes container, invert and class. The slots share their names across the blocks:

<c-footer.columns class="bg-base-200" tagline="Releases you can roll back with one click." notice="© 2026 Meridian GmbH">
  <c-slot name="logo"><a href="/"><img src="{% static 'img/logo.svg' %}" alt="Meridian" /></a></c-slot>
  <c-slot name="social">
    <c-button ghost size="sm" class="btn-square" icon="github" href="https://github.com/meridian" aria-label="Meridian on GitHub" />
  </c-slot>
  <c-footer.nav title="Product">
    <c-link hover href="/pricing/" text="Pricing" />
    <c-link hover href="/changelog/" text="Changelog" />
  </c-footer.nav>
  <c-footer.nav title="Company">
    <c-link hover href="/about/" text="About" />
    <c-link hover href="/careers/" text="Careers" />
  </c-footer.nav>
  <c-slot name="legal">
    <c-link hover href="/privacy/" text="Privacy" />
    <c-link hover href="/terms/" text="Terms" />
  </c-slot>
</c-footer.columns>

<c-footer.slim notice="© 2026 Meridian GmbH">
  <c-link hover href="/privacy/" text="Privacy" />
  <c-link hover href="/status/" text="Status" />
</c-footer.slim>

Things to know before using one:

• Each block is the page's footer element. Put it outside main and outside any section or article, or assistive technology stops announcing it as the end of the page. Use one to a page.
• The surface is yours. A block sets no background colour. Pass one in class, and add invert when it is a dark one such as bg-neutral.
• A block needs daisyUI's footer component from the project, as well as link and btn for what goes in the slots.
• Columns sit two abreast on a phone and in one row from the sm breakpoint. Three or four read best. Beside the brand corner, six leave each one little room.
• An icon-only social link needs an aria-label. The icon says nothing to a screen reader.
• The banner ships no form. Its actions slot takes your application's own, with its own address, token and validation.
• Anything left out leaves nothing behind. No logo, tagline or social links, and the columns take the full width. No notice and no small links, and there is no copyright line or rule.
• The two parts work on their own. Use <c-footer.brand> and <c-footer.legal> inside daisy-cotton's <c-footer>, or under a footer you lay out yourself.

The reasoning is in ADR 0013.

Every attribute, its accepted values and its default are listed on each block's and component's own page in the example project, built from the annotations in the block's template. Run it with python manage.py runserver from a checkout.

Sign in and sign up

Whole-page blocks for the two pages in front of an application. Each one is the layout and nothing behind it: the logo, the form and the buttons that skip the form are the application's, and arrive as slots. Five are for signing in, four for signing up, and one is the panel most of them draw their form in.

Every one takes title, lead, level, divider and class, and these slots:

Several add slots of their own: aside for a brand pane, nav for the far end of a top bar, points on pitch, media on showcase, tiles on bento and steps on the stepped sign-up.

With django-allauth, a sign-in template comes out like this:

{% load static socialaccount %}
<c-sign-in.split title="Welcome back" lead="Sign in to pick up where you left off.">
  <c-slot name="logo">
    <a href="/"><img src="{% static 'brand/logo.svg' %}" alt="Acme" class="h-8"></a>
  </c-slot>
  <c-slot name="providers">
    <c-button href="{% provider_login_url 'google' %}" outline class="btn-block" text="Continue with Google" />
  </c-slot>

  <form method="post" action="{% url 'account_login' %}">
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form.as_div }}
    <c-button type="submit" variant="primary" class="btn-block" text="Sign in" />
  </form>

  <c-slot name="footer">New here? <a class="link" href="{% url 'account_signup' %}">Create an account</a></c-slot>
  <c-slot name="background"><c-background.grid /></c-slot>
  <c-slot name="aside">
    <c-quote.byline invert name="Amara Okafor" role="Head of Platform, Northwind" />
  </c-slot>
</c-sign-in.split>

Things to know before using one:

• Each block fills the screen. It is the page, so put it straight inside body with no application shell around it.
• The logo is always a slot, and it is there at every width. On the layouts with a brand pane, the pane is dropped below the lg breakpoint and the logo stays with the form.
• No block renders a field. Use your own form rendering or daisy-cotton's form components. The demo's forms are stand-ins.
• The divider is drawn only between two things. With no providers, or with no form, there is no word between them. divider is the word. Left out, it is “or”, translated with the rest of the package's own words.
• A block has no words of its own beyond that divider and the line that opens the disclosure. A block given no title has no heading.
• The page keeps one heading. title is an h1 unless level says otherwise. On pitch the headline takes that level and the form's title sits one below it. The large line on floating and the caption on showcase are paragraphs.
• Give <c-sign-in.providers> open when the form comes back with errors, or the errors are folded away with it.
• What is in a brand pane is decoration. It is not shown on a narrow screen, so nothing a visitor needs belongs there. The picture on showcase is also hidden from a screen reader.
• surface is a pair of classes, a background and the text colour that goes with it: surface="bg-primary text-primary-content".
• <c-sign-up.stepped> takes the whole run of steps in its steps slot. daisy-cotton's <c-steps> is the obvious thing to put there.
• <c-auth.panel> is for a page none of these covers: a password reset, a code to confirm. It draws the same structure, with a card around it when given card.

Why the blocks stop at the frame is in ADR 0010.

Points

A short list of reasons, each a mark, a few words in bold and a sentence. <c-points> is the list and <c-points.point> is one reason in it.

<c-points>
  <c-points.point title="Ten minutes to set up.">
    Connect a repository and your next deploy shows up on its own.
  </c-points.point>
  <c-points.point title="Works where you already deploy from.">
    <c-slot name="mark"><c-icon name="github" /></c-slot>
    GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket.
  </c-points.point>
</c-points>

The mark is a tick in the theme's primary colour unless the mark slot holds something else. Either way it is hidden from a screen reader, so the words have to carry the point alone.

Contributing

Development setup, building the stylesheet and the rules changes are held to are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Changelog

Every release is recorded in CHANGELOG.md.

License

MIT