Django functions issue and urlconf confusion - django

Question

I couldn't place my question into one sentence.
I was following a tutorial to make a blog from scratch. But the tutorial predicted having all the categories, tags, months and years listings in separate templates.
I want to add a list of categories, a list of months and years on the main blog page.
So here is what I got. With this code, the list of categories is shown in the main page but only if you go to the blog/category url, and not in just blog/ where I want it to be.
**(r'^$', list),**
(r'^archive/(\d{1,2})/$', list),
(r'^\d{2}/d{4}/$', month),
(r'^([0-9]{4}/\d{1,2})/(?P<slug>.*)/$', detail),
(r'^(?P<year>\d{4})/$', year),
**(r'^category/$', category),**
I also tried:
(r'^$', category),
but no luck.
This is the same code from the template in category.html and in list.html:
{% if categories %}
{% for category in categories %}
<li class="cat-item"><a href="category/{{ category.name.lower }}/"
title="{{ category.name.capitalize }}">
{{ category.name.capitalize }}</a>
</li>
{% endfor %}
{% endif %}
Views.py:
def category(request):
return render_to_response('blog/list.html', {'categories':Category.objects.all(),},)
It was like this. I tried this, but no luck in def list:
return render_to_response('blog/list.html',{'posts':posts,
'next':next,
'previous':previous,
'categories':Category.objects.all(),
},)
How can I get what shows on blog/category to show on blog/ also?
Thanks.

Answer 1

When you type an url in your browser a request is sent to your server. Django then takes the url and matches it against it url patterns to determine the proper view. As soon as a view is found django stops matching and executes this view which in turn returns a response.
If you want to use your categories in different views you either have to to make sure that in every view the same categories context variable is provided to the template or, which is usually much better, write a simple custom template tag. For your categories this could look like this:
#register.inclusion_tag('blog/category_list.html')
def categories_list():
return { 'categories': Category.objects.all() }
In the file 'blog/categoy_list.html' would then be the code that is currently both in 'categories.html' and 'list.html'. In these files replace it with.
{% load your_blog_tags %}
{% categories_list %}
You can use that then wherever you need a category list. Of course the same applies for years and month lists.