Is there a way to have something execute for every view in django?

I'm new to Django and coming from Rails, so that may explain my odd questions below:

I have a main layout that has a sidebar that lists the latest updates to the site. That main layout is used for every page in my webapp so every template that is created extends main.html.

For the latest updates section, I just want to get the last 5 updates from posts to the web app every time a page is rendered. I thought about making the sidebar do this through an ajax call once the page is loaded, but I thought this may not be my best option.

I also considered creating a tag to do this for me and then just calling the tag inside of main.html. This is simple enough, but I'd have to write a lot of HTML inside of the tag code, which seems to be a little annoying (a lot of string appending and such, unless I'm wrong and there is a better way?)

I have read about Context Processors. This seemed to be exactly what I wanted, but it appears this may cause anothe开发者_JAVA技巧r issue where I have to pass a context_instance to every single render_to_response? This appears to be a lot of code repeat and I'm trying to avoid that if possible. Is there a way to just make render_to_response always take the RequestContext object without always having to specify it?

Are there any other ways to achieve having some code run for every view and eliminate the need to always pass data to a view?

Django 1.3 added the render shortcut which is the same as render_to_response but with RequestContext automatically used.

Templates is a appropriate place for this: the variant with custom tag and template inheritance is simple and convenient. To avoid string appending use mini-template just for your tag: it is called inclusion tags.

I would definitely go for the Ajax call, it is as simple as to create an small view which queries the model for the 5 latest posts, serializes them into json or xml data, and returns them in your HttpRequest object.

You can use direct_to_template instead of render_to_response.