Mastering Django: Core

Changing how fields are rendered

Probably the first thing you'll notice when you render this form locally is that the message field is displayed as an <input type="text">, and it ought to be a <textarea>. We can fix that by setting the field's widget:

from django import forms 
 
class ContactForm(forms.Form): 
    subject = forms.CharField() 
    email = forms.EmailField(required=False) 
    message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea)

The forms framework separates out the presentation logic for each field into a set of widgets. Each field type has a default widget, but you can easily override the default, or provide a custom widget of your own. Think of the Field classes as representing validation logic, while widgets represent presentation logic.