Django, custom tag… how?

Question

I would like to make a django custom tag to display 10 entry titles from the category where the user is reading an article. How can I do this? I need to pass the category from the actual entry.

Answer 1

The best way to do this would be with an inclusion tag. This is a tag that renders a template fragment which renders the 10 related articles.

You just pass in the current article into the tag, and return the context for the template fragment - ie the related articles.

@register.inclusion_tag('related_articles.html')
def related_articles(article, count):
    category = article.category
    articles = category.article_set.exclude(id=article.id)[:count]
    return {'articles': articles}

You'll need a related_articles.html file in your templates directory which outputs the articles. Then, to call it from your main template, you would just do

{% related_articles article 10 %}

where article is the name of the article object.

Answer 2

Why a custom tag? It's probably better, cleaner, to add a method to the article model, and call that from the template. Depending on your model, the method would be practically trivial.

Answer 3

Check here for making custom tags:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-template-tags/#howto-custom-template-tags

You would need to pass the relevant category object to the template context.