Building a "history" system that serves static pages based on the date the user asks for. Not all dates have associated pages, and it isn't possible to know, based on what's in the database which do, which don't. I haven't been able to find a way to redirect to a static page because there doesn't seem to be any way to capture the value of the {{STATIC_URL}} tag on the python side. I have got some code that depends on the static file being on the same file system as the django server, but that is clearly wrong. I have two needs:
1: how can I (redirect?) to the static page(s) from my views.py file?
2: how can I query for the existence of a particular one of those static pages?
I'm not certain from your question if you understand the intention of the {{ STATIC_URL }} tag. It is a URL prefix for static content files such as css, javascript, or image files. It is not intended as a path for your own static HTML files. In the end I'm not sure you are asking the right question for what you are wanting to accomplish.
As zzzirk says: Django really isn't about flat pages, so the most Djangonic solution is to put flat pages beside the django app, not within it.
Related
Is Zurb Foundation's Interchange compatible for use with Django templates? I can't see a way to get them to work together, though the issue is just a technical one - Interchange seems to want html file paths, while Django's html templates render inline.
I suppose it would be possible to render the necessary templates each request into temporary files and hand those to Interchange, but that's not a very clean solution and would require a lot of boilerplate. I'm looking for a cleaner solution or for an alternative within Foundation and Django.
No, Foundation's interchange is javascript that runs in the browser within the HTML file produced by Django on your back-end. It's meant to be used for loading static files, mostly media, dependent on the size class of your browser view. E.g. inside and <img> tag:
<img data-interchange="[{% static 'images/my_background_small.png' %}, small], [{% static 'images/my_background.png' %}, medium]>
If you want to serve different HTML to different types of end-devices, you have to add that logic to your Django app's view, so that it uses a different template depending on the client. In general there are a few approaches:
What people do nowadays: Write responsive templates so that the same
HTML is served for mobile and desktop. For the few minor
differences, you can hide/show divs depending on the media class.
Check the device in your middleware and pass it as parameter to your views and templates so you can make decisions on it. Check django-mobile for example
Check the device in your server (apache or nginx) and add an HTTP header to your request that you can parse in your view (e.g. request.META.get('HTTP_MOBILE_SITE','no'). Example here
I want a link in my webpage header bar that points to a certain part of a page (for example, the lower half). It's easily done with pure HTML but I wonder how to do it in django.
HTML version:
In base.html:
Introduction
In entrance.html:
<a name="intro"></a>
How can I do the same thing in django? Any better solutions than just writing one more view function?
There is no difference in doing it with Django when compared to just normal HTML. Just continue doing it the HTML way.
There's also another way to tag html elements by id AND use the url template tag from django:
https://engineertodeveloper.com/a-better-way-to-route-back-to-a-section-ids-in-django/
(Credits for Brian, who wrote the solution at the link above)
this can be very useful if you, for some reason, need to use the url method for creating your links.
I'm working on a Django site with a basic three column design. Left column navigation, center column content and right column URL specific content blocks.
My question is about the best method of controlling the URL specific content blocks in the right column.
I am thinking of something along the lines of the Flatpages app that will make the content available to the template context if the URL matches a pre-determined pattern (perhaps regex?).
Does anyone know if such an app already exists?
If not, I am looking for some advice about the best way to implement it. Particularly in relation to the matching of patterns to the current URL. Is there any good way to re-use parts of the Django URL dispatcher for this use?
Django CMS is a good suggestion, it depends on how deep you want to go. If this is just the beginning of different sorts of dynamic content you want then you should go that way for sure.
A simple one-off solution would be something like this:
You would just need to write a view and add some variables on the end of the URL that would define what showed up there. Depending on how fancy you need to get, you could just create a simple models, and just map the view to the model key
www.example.com/content/sidecontent/jokes/
so if "jokes" was your block of variable sidecontent (one of many in your sides model instances) the urls.py entry for that would be
(r'^content/sidecontent/(?P<side>)/$,sides.views.showsides),
and then in your sides app you have a view with a
def showsides(request, side):
Sides.objects.get(pk=side)
etc...
For something like this I personally would use Django CMS. It's like flatpages on steroids.
Django CMS has a concept of Pages, Templates, and Plugins. Each page has an associated template. Templates have placeholders where you can insert different plugins. Plugins are like mini-applications that can have dynamic model-based content.
Although Django-CMS is an interesting suggestion, there are quite a few projects that do specifically what you've requested - render blocks of content based on a URL. The main one that I know about is django-flatblocks.
Building a django app with some mostly static pages at the front of the site e.g. about.html faq.html
that kind of thing
I was looking at how urls.py work and I created this.
('(.+\.html)$', direct_to_template),
It seems to do exactly what I needed. Now for any new .html page I add to the root of my templates folder it just works. templates/about.html templates/faq.hml
I can also use things like this in my templates
{% include "_menu.html" %}
Now someone has kindly pointed out Django FlatPages and suggested maybe I use them instead. If I'm not connecting to the db are there any disadvantages to the way I'm doing it.
Seems to me like its a better way to do it than FlatPages because it uses the db and isn't quite as elegant (haven't actually used flatpages in practice though)
If you're ok editing template files directly and manually adding new ones to your urls.py file, then stick with what you've got. Flatpages is useful if you want to be able to edit page content from the admin interface or any web-based editing tool you might care to design, or perhaps more to the point: if you want non-technical users to be able to edit the content.
I would suggest moving one step further. If your static content doesn't change frequently and doesn't make use of Django's templates then don't use Django to serve them. Use a light weight server such as Nginx instead.
If you do make use of Django's template features without requiring any dynamic content from the database then you can stick with direct_to_template.
One advantage to using FlatPages is that you can use the Django templates to for headers, sidebars, footers (to maintain a consistent site appearance) while still using mostly plain HTML for the page content. That is offset by the need to store the page content in a database table.
My advice? If what you're doing is meeting your needs, stick with what works.
Since Django urls are arbitrary, including those set when you create flatpages. How can you figure out what a page's parent is? That is if I create a page /about/contact/, then when I am on the contact page (in the template), how can I figure out what the parent page is?
Is there a standard way to do this? Or do I just split the slug on the slashes and use the first section?
Basically I'm trying to figure out how to create different site sections.
As far as I know, django doesn't have a native concept of sections and, as you said, the URLs are arbitrary (they're left to the programmer to decide). If you stick with the same URL structure throughout your whole site (/<section>/page) then you can infer the section from the URL.
I'd rather set the section in the url patterns and pass it to the views (as described in here) which in turn can pass it to the templates...
flatpages are essentially the same thing as static html pages, stored in your database with a pretty admin in front of it.
so just hard code a link, it shouldn't be a big deal.
if it is a big deal, that means flatpages probably isn't the solution for you