Django: Web Development with Python

Organizing templates

The default project layout created by the startproject command does not define a location for your templates. This is very easy to fix. Create a directory named templates in your project's root directory. Add the TEMPLATE_DIRS variable in your settings.py:

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))
TEMPLATE_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')]

That's all. For example, you can add a template called about.html and refer to it in the urls.py file as follows:

urlpatterns = patterns(
    '',
    url(r'^about/$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='about.html'),
        name='about'),

Your templates can also reside within your apps. Creating a templates directory inside your app directory is ideal to store your app-specific templates. ...