How to correctly pre-populate textarea in django?

Question

I have this rather annoying problem:

In the template I have

<div class="form-group">
    {{ form.aboutme.errors }}
    <label for="aboutme">About Me:</label>
    <textarea class="form-control" rows="10" id="aboutme" value="{{form.aboutme}}"></textarea>
</div>

It renders the textarea pre-populated but with the value but prints a redundant "> at the end of the box.

The raw html looks like this:

<textarea class="form-control" rows="10" id="aboutme" value="<p><textarea cols=" 40"="" name="aboutme">My Name is Django</textarea>

Which obviously has an unintnded textarea tag inserted within.

the field is:

 aboutme=models.TextField(blank=True, verbose_name=_('About Me'))

And there is no specia widget used for it in its respective ModelForm class.

So really confused how to correctly render this field?

Answer 1

The textarea html tag has no value attribute. The right syntax is:

<textarea class="form-control" rows="10" id="aboutme">{{ form.aboutme.value }}</textarea>

Answer 2

Read more about widgets.

In this situation you could go with following. Try to get the value from the field:

<textarea class="form-control" rows="10" id="aboutme" value="{{form.aboutme.value}}"></textarea>

If it won't work, using article from link above or following SO question add widget to CharField of your form and then simply use:

{{ form.aboutme }}

As I see you've done it and Django successfuly render <textarea> with <p> tags and populated value. You could try to add more cutomization to widget.