Question

I am developing a website with django and want to keep a common template for header and footer. The contents of the header and footer vary with respect to the user logged in. So is there a way where i could use:

    header=render_to_response('header.html',{....})
    footer=render_to_response('footer.html',{....})
    content=render_to_response('content.html',{....})
    return header+content+footer

Answer 1

Harsh, concatenating HttpResponse objects is not the way to do it. Django’s (and I believe, reasonable) approach recommends using templates including and inheritance. Please, take a look at {% block %}, {% include %} and {% extend %} template tags here.

In your case the way to implement template inheritance looks like:

base.html :

<div> header code </div>
{% block content %}
    <div>Default content</div>
{% endblock content %}
<div> footer code </div>

my.template.html :

{% extend 'base.html' %}
{% block content %}
  <div>My new content</div>
{% endblock content %}