Some time ago after reading a post on Eric Florenzano’s blog about hacking together support for Cheetah with Django, I decided to add “proper” support for Cheetah/Django to Cheetah v2.2.1 (released June 1st, 2009). At the time I didn’t use Django for anything, so I didn’t really think about it too much more.
Now that I work at Apture, which uses Django as part of its stack, Cheetah and Django playing nicely together is more attractive to me and as such I wanted to jot down a quick example project for others to use for getting started with Cheetah and Django. You can find the django_cheetah_example project on GitHub, but the gist of how this works is as follows.
Requires
Getting Started
For all intents and purposes, using Cheetah in place of Django’s templating system is a trivial change in how you write your views.
After following the Django getting started
documentation, you’ll want to create a directory for your Cheetah templates, such
as Cheetar/templates. Be sure to touch __init__.py in your template
directory to ensure that templates can be imported if they need to.
Add your new template directory to the TEMPLATE_DIRS attribute
in your project’s settings.py.
Once that is all set up, utilizing Cheetah templates in Django is just
a matter of a few lines in your view code:
import Cheetah.Django
def index(req):
return Cheetah.Django.render('index.tmpl', greet=False)</code>
Note: Any keyword-arguments you pass into the Cheetah.Django.render()
function will be exposed in the template’s “searchList”, meaning you can
then access them with $-placeholders. (i.e. $greet)
With the current release of Cheetah (v2.4.1), there isn’t support for using pre-compiled Cheetah templates with Django (it’d be trivial to put together though) which means Cheetah.Django.render() uses Cheetah’s dynamic compilation mode which can add a bit of overhead since templates are compiled at runtime (your mileage may vary).