django-templatepages 0.2.3

Django app for mapping URLs to templates on the filesystem

django-templatepages

django-templatepages is a Django app for mapping URLs to templates on the filesystem as if they were static web pages. This is useful for integrating static content into your Django project while still leveraging the Django templating language.

templatepages differs from django.contrib.flatpages in that the content is stored entirely in templates on the filesystem, rather than in a database. We developed this app to address a real-world situation where much of the content in a project is static and managed on the filesystem under version control. templatepages allows us to factor out the page layout using the Django templating language, and cleanly integrate the static content with other dynamic components implemented as Django apps.

Python’s mimetypes.guess_type() is used to determine appropriate Content-type and Content-encoding headers for the HTTP response. This means that you can use templatepages for more than just HTML files; for example, we use it to serve dynamically-generated CSS stylesheets.

Usage

Using templatepages is relatively straightforward: just add it to INSTALLED_APPS in your project’s settings.py file, and integrate the URL mapping in your project’s urls.py file. Then place your templates in your project’s templates/templatepages folder.

For example, the following stanza in urls.py will configure your project to map all requests beginning with articles/ to templatepages:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^articles/', include('templatepages.urls')),
)

In this example, a request for http://your.site/articles/contact.html should result in templatepages attempting to return a rendered template based on templates/templatepages/contact.html. If this file cannot be found, templatepages will raise Http404.

If no filename is specified in the URL, templatepages will attempt to render index.html.

templatepages passes RequestContext to the template, so full access to template context processor variables is available.