Django urls straight to html template

Question

Learning django & python.

Just set up a new site after doing the tutorial. Now for arguments sake say I want to add a bunch of About us, FAQ basic html pages with very limited dynamic elements do you go ahead and write a new line in my urls.py file for each page? or is their some neat way to say map all * *.html to the relevant .html file directly?

In general even if it does require a view will I have to write a new line in the url.py file for every page?

Answer 1

As long as there is some uniquely identifying section in the URL, you will not need to create an entry in urls.py for each direct-template url.

For example, you could say that all urls ending in ".html" are referencing a direct file from the templates.

urlpatterns = patterns('django.views.generic.simple',
    (r'(.+\.html)$', 'direct_to_template'),
    # ...
)

Take a look at http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/ref/generic-views/#django-views-generic-simple-direct-to-template for details.

Answer 2

Currently the best way to do this is using TemplateView from generic class-based views:

from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView

url(r'^$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='index.html'), name='home'),

Answer 3

Write a url which grabs the static pages you're interested in

url(r'^(?P<page_name>about|faq|press|whatever)/$', 'myapp.staticpage', name='static-pages')

The staticpage view function in myapp

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template
from django.http import Http404

def staticpage(request, page_name):
    # Use some exception handling, just to be safe
    try:
        return direct_to_template(request, '%s.html' % (page_name, ))
    except TemplateDoesNotExist:
        raise Http404

Of course, you need to follow a naming convention for your templates, but this pattern can be expanded upon as needed.

This is better than the .+\.html pattern because it will treat templates which don't exist as 404s, whereas .+\.html will blow up with 500 errors if the template doesn't exist.

Answer 4

If you're using the class based views because direct_to_template has been deprecated, you can create a simple wrapper that renders your own templates directly:

from django.views.generic import TemplateView
from django.template import TemplateDoesNotExist
from django.http import Http404

class StaticView(TemplateView):
    def get(self, request, page, *args, **kwargs):
        self.template_name = page
        response = super(StaticView, self).get(request, *args, **kwargs)
        try:
            return response.render()
        except TemplateDoesNotExist:
            raise Http404()

and in your router:

from myapp.static.views import StaticView

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^(?P<page>.+\.html)$', StaticView.as_view()),
    # ...
)