For this site I have a large number of static pages. Django provides two ways of serving such content: flatpages and the generic view direct_to_template. I prefer the direct_to_template system, but it gets a bit overwhelming when you have a lot pages. I didn't want to define a url pattern for each page, so I wrote a system to handle it. With this system I never have to write a single url pattern, or even an explicit URL.
First we add to our urls.py the pattern:
(r'^(?P<page>.+?)/(?P<path>.*?)/?$', 'website.site.views.static_page')
Now we define the actual view; take note this depends on a dictionary of lists called pages:
def static_page(request, path, page):
if not path and page in pages:
template = ''.join((page,"/index.html"))
elif page in pages and path in pages[page]:
template = ''.join((page, "/", path, ".html"))
else:
raise Http404
return render_to_response(template, {},
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
So this code takes the page and path and determines if they exist (as defined in the pages dictionary), and then renders a template which is either page/index.html or page/path.html. Multiple levels are supported, and would be expanded in path. So in the case of a pages dictionary like:
pages = {'oggify': ('development', 'osx'),
'about': ()}
This defines the following URLs:
/oggify/
/oggify/development/
/oggify/osx/
/about/
I'd have a templates directory that looks like:
templates/
oggify/
index.html
development.html
osx.html
about/
index.html
We could easily extend this system with more context, or page dependent context with very little effort.
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