Mastering Django: Core

Advanced custom template tags

Sometimes the basic features for custom template tag creation aren't enough. Don't worry, Django gives you complete access to the internals required to build a template tag from the ground up.

A quick overview

The template system works in a two-step process: compiling and rendering. To define a custom template tag, you specify how the compilation works and how the rendering works. When Django compiles a template, it splits the raw template text into nodes. Each node is an instance of django.template.Node and has a render() method. A compiled template is, simply, a list of Node objects.

When you call render() on a compiled template object, the template calls render() on each Node in its node list, with the given context. ...