Announcing native Chameleon template engine support in Django

Hello Django users!

  Today I sat down and wrote a native template Loader for Chameleon support in Django.  For those not familiar with this template engine, it was used in the previously infamous Zope and later Plone web frameworks.  It uses mostly XHTML formatting and documentation generation, and is supposedly very fast!  You can find the project over on my BitBucket page here:

https://bitbucket.org/kveroneau/django-chameleon-templates

  The README file explains it's usage, and it also contains some example templates and a standard Django view to see it in action.  The project itself has drop-in replacements for Django's own filesystem.Loader and app_directories.Loader, so using it with your existing Django projects couldn't be easier.  On top of these drop-in replacement, it has another Loader which instead of using TEMPLATE_DIRS like filesystem.Loader does, it uses another settings variable called CHAMELEON_TEMPLATES, which uses the exact same format.

  This project can for example help those moving from either Pyramid or a Zope/Plone solution over to Django.  As it uses the Django API natively, including it's context variables.  Furthermore, I also included Django's URL Reversal into Chameleon, so you can still properly generate your URLs like normal.  There is even a METAL macro to generate the CSRF_TOKEN construct.

  It does not support Django's native template tags and filters, but most of them aren't really needed.  If you have your own custom tags or filters, they will need to be recoded for Chameleon.  Adding new METAL macros takes on a similar method to how you add new template tags and filters.  You mere just create a macros/ directory inside your apps directory, and place .pt template files in there with the macro definitions.  The filename is used for the namespace inside the Chameleon template engine.  For example, say you have a macro file called example.pt with the following contents:

<p metal:define-macro="hello">    Hello, <strong metal:define-slot="name">World</strong>  </p>

To use this macro inside any other template in your project, you merely use either of the following:

<p metal:use-macro="example.hello" />

- Or -

<p metal:use-macro="example.hello" >    <i metal:fill-slot="name">Kevin</i>  </p>

Wonderful, isn't it?  It makes working with Chamelon inside Django super simple and very Django-like.

I hope to soon add the ability to add new expressions into the template engine using some sort of registry, similar to how Django's own template engine adds new tags.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about this Django app.

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