Django urls straight to html template

Learning django & python.

Just set up a new site after doing the tutorial. Now for arguments sake say I want to add a bu开发者_C百科nch of About us, FAQ basic html pages with very limited dynamic elements do you go ahead and write a new line in my urls.py file for each page? or is their some neat way to say map all * *.html to the relevant .html file directly?

In general even if it does require a view will I have to write a new line in the url.py file for every page?

As long as there is some uniquely identifying section in the URL, you will not need to create an entry in urls.py for each direct-template url.

For example, you could say that all urls ending in ".html" are referencing a direct file from the templates.

urlpatterns = patterns('django.views.generic.simple',
    (r'(.+\.html)$', 'direct_to_template'),
    # ...
)

Take a look at http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/ref/generic-views/#django-views-generic-simple-direct-to-template for details.

Currently the best way to do this is using TemplateView from generic class-based views:

from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView

url(r'^$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='index.html'), name='home'),

Write a url which grabs the static pages you're interested in

url(r'^(?P<page_name>about|faq|press|whatever)/$', 'myapp.staticpage', name='static-pages')

The staticpage view function in myapp

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template
from django.http import Http404

def staticpage(request, page_name):
    # Use some exception handling, just to be safe
    try:
        return direct_to_template(request, '%s.html' % (page_name, ))
    except TemplateDoesNotExist:
        raise Http404

Of course, you need to follow a naming convention for your templates, but this pattern can be expanded upon as needed.

This is better than the .+\.html pattern because it will treat templates which don't exist as 404s, whereas .+\.html will blow up with 500 errors if the template doesn't exist.

If you're using the class based views because direct_to_template has been deprecated, you can create a simple wrapper that renders your own templates directly:

from django.views.generic import TemplateView
from django.template import TemplateDoesNotExist
from django.http import Http404

class StaticView(TemplateView):
    def get(self, request, page, *args, **kwargs):
        self.template_name = page
        response = super(StaticView, self).get(request, *args, **kwargs)
        try:
            return response.render()
        except TemplateDoesNotExist:
            raise Http404()

and in your router:

from myapp.static.views import StaticView

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^(?P<page>.+\.html)$', StaticView.as_view()),
    # ...
)

One way to do this would be to write a single custom view that wraps the direct_to_template generic view. The wrapper could accept a parameter and accordingly form the name of the template and pass it to direct_to_template. This way you can route multiple pages with a single URL configuration.

Something like this:

url(r'^foo/(?P<page_name>\w+).html$', 'my_static_wrapper', name = 'my_static_wrapper'),

def my_static_wrapper(request, page_name):
    # form template name and call direct_to_template

That said I suspect that there are better solutions out there though.

Slight Changes for latest versions of Django.

from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
 path('',TemplateView.as_view(template_name='index.html'), name='home'),
]