13.6. Creating a Django Project: Templates and Rendering

Creating a Django project involves several steps, one of the most important of which is template creation and rendering. Django was designed to help developers build web applications efficiently with less code. Django's templating system is a crucial part of this, as it allows developers to create complex user interfaces without having to write a lot of HTML code.

What are templates?

Templates are files that contain HTML code with additional markup to insert dynamic data. In other words, a template is an HTML file that contains placeholders for data that will be inserted when the template is rendered.

How to create a Django template?

To create a Django template, you need to create an HTML file in your application's templates directory. For example, if you have an application called 'blog', you could create a file called 'post_list.html' in the 'blog/templates/blog' directory.

The contents of this file might look something like this:

{% extends 'blog/base.html' %}

{% block content %}
  
Posts
  {% for post in posts %}
    

      
{{ post.title }}
      
{{ post.text|linebreaksbr }}
    
  {% endfor %}
{% endblock %}

This is a simple example of a Django template. It extends a base template (base.html) and defines a content block. Within that block, it iterates over a list of posts and displays the title and text of each post. The '|linebreaksbr' tag is a filter that converts line breaks into '
' tags.

Template rendering

The rendering of a template is the process of filling the placeholders with real data. In Django, this is done using the 'render()' function. This function takes an HttpRequest object, the name of a template and a data dictionary, and returns an HttpResponse object with the content of the rendered template.

Here is an example of how you can render the 'post_list.html' template in a view:

from django.shortcuts import render

def post_list(request):
    posts = Post.objects.all()
    return render(request, 'blog/post_list.html', {'posts': posts})

This view function retrieves all the posts from the database, and then calls the 'render()' function with the request, the template name and a dictionary containing the posts. The 'render()' function renders the template and returns the result as an HTTP response.

Conclusion

Template creation and rendering are essential parts of web application development with Django. Templates let you create complex user interfaces with ease, while rendering lets you populate these templates with dynamic data. With practice, you can create powerful and flexible web applications with Django.

This is just the beginning. There's a lot more you can do with Django templates, like template inheritance, template inclusion, custom template tags and filters, and much more. Explore the Django documentation to learn more about these advanced features.