Pro Django

CHAPTER 6Templates

While Chapter 2 made it clear that Django is built entirely on Python, and standard Python rules apply, templates are the exception to the rule. Templates are Django's provided way of generating text-based output, such as HTML or emails, where the people editing those documents may not have any experience with Python. Therefore, templates are designed to avoid using Python directly, instead favoring an extensible, easy-to-use custom language built just for Django.

By disallowing arbitrary Python expressions, templates are certainly restricted in some ways, but there are two things to keep in mind. First, the template system is backed by Python, just like everything else in Django, so it's always possible to add Python-level ...