Surfing in Kansas

The Problem

Any sufficiently large Django project starts to have a wide variety of Template Tags and Filters. Even Django ships with a dizzying array of them that allow you to do all sorts of fun and interesting things. Ellington, our CMS at work, has a ton, and I've been thinking about ways to make tags and filters a bit more accessible to people who are using the CMS.

I'm thinking along the lines of people who are tech savvy, but who were just hit with a huge wall of tags and filters to look at. I want them to be able to really easily play with the functionality and see what it does.

The Solution

I created a proof of concept playground for tags and filters in the django admin. It is released as a simple third party app that I have up on Github. Here is a small 1:40 minute screencast that explains what I did:

Django Admin Playground from Eric Holscher on Vimeo.

It gives you a "Play" link next to each of the tags and filters in the admin. Once you click on that, if the docstring for the tag has a code example, it attempts to parse that out. This allows you to easily test out the examples that you should have in the docstrings for your tags.

It displays the docstring above the input areas and allows you to input context variables (naively) and render the template. It uses Jquery to do an ajax post and response that is displayed on the right side of what the output of the template would be.

A simple example with the Add Template Tag:

Caveats

This is very hacky and basic code. Totally just a proof of concept and might not work for you. I think that the ideas are worthwhile, and something that could be included in Django at some point.

Currently the context values are just being parsed at the : and split into a dictionary. If anyone knows a good way to turn a basic list like this (using YAML?) into Django objects, then I would be all ears. I thought about it a little bit but couldn't think of an elegant solution.

Also the parsing of the templatetag syntax out of the templates is incredibly simplistic. If I took some time and played around with ReST I'm sure I could figure out a better way to do that (Pulling out the "code blocks" somehow?). But a basic regex worked well enough to get the idea done.

Feedback welcome.