January 10, 2009

Django Template Development review

Django 1.0 Template Development

You wouldn’t know it by look­ing at this site, or the HTML behind it, but I actu­aly started off life as a Web designer for my col­lege paper.

So even though my day job revolves around appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, caching strate­gies, count­less meet­ings, and wor­ry­ing about things like page views and CPMs I’ve got a long back­ground in HTML man­age­ment and tem­plate sys­tems, includ­ing glo­ri­fied tem­plate sys­tems (unfortunately).

With that in mind, I agreed to review Django 1.0 Tem­plate Devel­op­ment. I met the author (before he was an author), Scott Newman, “through the Internet” as we both worked at media orga­ni­za­tions and we were using Django along­side legacy con­tent systems.

The book does a good job of focus­ing in on the Django tem­plate system, specif­i­cally focus­ing on what a Web designer would need to know to work well with a back-​end developer.

It includes just enough Python and Django knowl­edge to pro­vide a good con­text and back­ground to folks who already have to worry about bal­ance, typog­ra­phy, color, stan­dards com­pli­ance and browser incompatibilities.

I’d say that if you were a free­lance Web designer who wanted to ven­ture into doing some light devel­op­ment for clients you could start with the book and one other Python or Django ref­er­ence to have enough knowl­edge to lever­age the admin inter­face, generic views, and of course tem­plates.

But if you’re a designer work­ing with a devel­op­ment team and you really don’t care about caching, mid­dle­ware or trail­ing commas on tuples you can easily skip past those sec­tions and just stay focused on tem­plate coding.

My one pony request is that the book should talk a bit more about strate­gies for tem­plate inher­i­tance, naming con­ven­tions, includes, tem­plate man­age­ment and the like. But a lot of that knowl­edge is only applic­a­ble to folks in lar­gish Django deploy­ments and I could see where it’d over­whelm a designer just trying to learn the tem­plate system.

I plan to give a copy to the design team at work and see if helps get them dived into our Django tem­plates. (Today, our devel­op­ers imple­ment the tem­plate code based on HTML given to us by the designers).

Filed under: Django,Programming,Web design

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  • http://www.dassnagar.co.uk/ Pamela Scoot

    You told a lot about the Django 1.0 Tem­plate Devel­op­ment and its author. So as a designer i am inter­ested to go through the book and after that i will give my opin­ion .Thank you for the post.