The default project layout created by the startproject command does not define a location for your templates. This is very easy to fix. Create a directory named templates in your project's root directory. Add the TEMPLATE_DIRS variable in your settings.py:
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__)) TEMPLATE_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')]
That's all. For example, you can add a template called about.html and refer to it in the urls.py file as follows:
urlpatterns = patterns(
'',
url(r'^about/$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='about.html'),
name='about'),Your templates can also reside within your apps. Creating a templates directory inside your app directory is ideal to store your app-specific templates.
Here are some good practices to organize your templates:
- Keep all app-specific templates inside the
app's template directory within a separate directory, for example,projroot/app/templates/app/template.html—notice howappappears twice in the path - Use the
.htmlextension for your templates - Prefix an underscore for templates, which are snippets to be included, for example,
_navbar.html
From Django 1.8 onward, multiple template engines will be supported. There will be built-in support for the Django template language (the standard template language discussed earlier) and Jinja2. In many benchmarks, Jinja2 is quite faster than Django templates.
It is expected that there will be an additional TEMPLATES setting for specifying the template engine and all template-related settings. The TEMPLATE_DIRS setting will be soon deprecated.
Note
Madame O
For the first time in weeks, Steve's office corner was bustling with frenetic activity. With more recruits, the now five-member team comprised of Brad, Evan, Jacob, Sue, and Steve. Like a superhero team, their abilities were deep and amazingly well-balanced.
Brad and Evan were the coding gurus. While Evan was obsessed over details, Brad was the big-picture guy. Jacob's talent in finding corner cases made him perfect for testing. Sue was in charge of marketing and design.
In fact, the entire design was supposed to be done by an avant-garde design agency. It took them a month to produce an abstract, vivid, color-splashed concept loved by the management. It took them another two weeks to produce an HTML-ready version from their Photoshop mockups. However, it was eventually discarded as it proved to be sluggish and awkward on mobile devices.
Disappointed by the failure of what was now widely dubbed as the "unicorn vomit" design, Steve felt stuck. Hart had phoned him quite concerned about the lack of any visible progress to show management. In a grim tone, he reminded Steve, "We have already eaten up the project's buffer time. We cannot afford any last-minute surprises."
It was then that Sue, who had been unusually quiet since she joined, mentioned that she had been working on a mockup using Twitter's Bootstrap. Sue was the growth hacker in the team—a keen coder and a creative marketer.
She admitted having just rudimentary HTML skills. However, her mockup was surprisingly thorough and looked familiar to users of other contemporary social networks. Most importantly, it was responsive and worked perfectly on every device from tablets to mobiles.
The management unanimously agreed on Sue's design, except for someone named Madame O. One Friday afternoon, she stormed into Sue's cabin and began questioning everything from the background color to the size of the mouse cursor. Sue tried to explain to her with surprising poise and calm.
An hour later, when Steve decided to intervene, Madame O was arguing why the profile pictures must be in a circle rather than square. "But a site-wide change like that will never get over in time," he said. Madame O shifted her gaze to him and gave him a sly smile. Suddenly, Steve felt a wave of happiness and hope surge within him. It felt immensely reliving and stimulating. He heard himself happily agreeing to all she wanted.
Later, Steve learnt that Madame Optimism was a minor mentalist who could influence prone minds. His team loved to bring up the latter fact on the slightest occasion.