Django: DRY Internal links in TextFields - django

Question

I have a site with a bunch of 'Projects' which often refer to each other in their descriptions (stored in a TextField).
Rather than hard-coding the links between projects in their descriptions, I'd like to keep things DRY by referring to them using some sort of token, for example, in the description field:
Blabla text describing this project, this project was inspired by
{{ project "ProjectB"}} and lead to the development of {{ project "ProjectC" }}.
Which is then processed and turned in to:
Blabla text describing this project, this project was inspired by
ProjectB and lead to the development
of ProjectC.
To be clear: the description is free text which can contain none to many references to other items as hyperlinks at various points in the text. In a CMS this effect is usually achieved through some way to link to items by node/object ID - so that if the link changes, the reference can still be followed.
I've considered:
Evaluating the text field as a Template and using the 'url' templatetag in descriptions. Seems like the easiest solution but that templatetag isn't particularly friendly for content editors and evaluating each description through the entire Template renderer seems a bit cumbersome.
Implementing a templatetag which just re-implements a basic faux-templating system to just parse out a nice simple tag just for this purpose.
Extending the TextField to pre-process the description before it's saved to the database.
Has anyone done anything similar? What would you suggest?

Answer 1

I just answered a similar question on SO, and it seems like it might solve your problem as well (if by chance you're still looking for an answer three years later).
I wrote a template filter to parse the custom internal link format in the Textfield before display. I'm using Markdown to parse my textfields, so I made the links return in Markdown format, but they could easily be written as HTML instead.
Check out my answer here.
Update: I posted a revised version on djangosnippets.org that resolves internal links inside a markdown-formatted link, as well as on their own.

Answer 2

if I got your problem, you should use a custom template processor to pass a dictionary to your templates:
in settings.py:
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
"django.core.context_processors.auth",
"django.core.context_processors.debug",
"django.core.context_processors.i18n",
"django.core.context_processors.media",
"myapp.myprocessor.foo",
)
in myapp/myprocessor.py:
from django import template
def foo(request):
ProjectA = get_Project_from_database
t = template.Template(ProjectA.html)
c = template.Context({'name': ProjectA.name})
rendered_ProjectA = t.render(c)
return { 'rendered_ProjectA': rendered_ProjectA }
or if you don't wanna use Django template system you can use regular expressions (import re)