How to make project templates and Satchmo templates co-exist? - django

Question

I'm working with a Satchmo installation that resides within an existing project. This project has its own templates as well as templates for some of the various apps that are installed. Some of these app-specific templates have their own app_base.html variations that expect to derive form base.html. I'd like to be able to do the same thing with my Satchmo templates and have them reside within my project's base, but also have some additional html added around all of them.
/templates
base.html
index.html
/news
news_base.html (extends base.html and adds news-specific template features)
index.html
detail.html
/store
base.html (overriding Satchmo's base)
This structure works somewhat, but not how I expected. in /store/base.html (Satchmo's base) I've simply replaced everything with a test message. I can see the message, so I know satchmo is loading its base and not the site's base. However, I can't extend my project's base anymore since using:
{% extends "base.html %}
Yields a recursion error since its calling itself and the following simply won't work.
{% extends "../base.html" %}
I realize that I can change my project's base.html to a slightly different name and point all app-specific templates at them, but it seems like a pretty major hack on such a fundamental aspect of the template structure.

Answer 1

Hmm, I didn't think django looked up templates relatively like that.
Kinda crazy hack, but this should work:
/templates/store/base.html extends "global_base.html"
/templates/global_base.html extends "base.html"

Answer 2

Depending on how you have your template structure set up, it might also be a good idea to play with the settings.TEMPLATE_LOADERS variable.
TEMPLATE_LOADERS Default:
('django.template.loaders.filesystem.load_template_source',
'django.template.loaders.app_directories.load_template_source')
A tuple of callables (as strings) that
know how to import templates from
various sources. See The Django
template language: For Python
programmers.
For more information on how this affects the template loading process:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#loader-types
From the way you describe your problem, it seems like by commenting out the "app_directories.load_template_source" file line, you might be able to better find a way to accomplish what you're doing.
django.template.loaders.app_directories.load_template_source
Loads templates from Django apps on
the filesystem. For each app in
INSTALLED_APPS, the loader looks for a
templates subdirectory. If the
directory exists, Django looks for
templates in there.
This means you can store templates
with your individual apps. This also
makes it easy to distribute Django
apps with default templates.
For example, for this setting:
INSTALLED_APPS = ('myproject.polls',
'myproject.music') ...then
get_template('foo.html') will look for
templates in these directories, in
this order:
/path/to/myproject/polls/templates/foo.html
/path/to/myproject/music/templates/foo.html
Note that the loader performs an
optimization when it is first
imported: It caches a list of which
INSTALLED_APPS packages have a
templates subdirectory.
This loader is enabled by default.

Answer 3

I just had this same problem. It looks like the satchmo developers planned for this by putting an "empty" base in the shop template directory. While this may not be relevant to you anymore, I would have like to have seen this here.
You can make a "shop" directory in your template directory and copy the main satchmo base.html to that directory.
This worked for me.