Question

I have some flatpages with empty content field and their content inside the template (given with template_name field).

Why I am using django.contrib.flatpages

• It allows me to serve (mostly) static pages with minimal URL configuration.
• I don’t have to write views for each of them.

Why I don’t need the model FlatPage

• I leave the content empty and just supply a template path. Therefore I can take advantage of having the source in a file;
  • I can edit the source directly from the file system, without the help of a server (such as admin).
  • I can take advantage of syntax highlightning and other editor features.
• With the model I have to maintain fixtures for flatpages.
  • So the data for the same entity is in two seperate places.
  • If I move the content inside the fixture it’ll be more difficult to edit.
    • Even if fixture maintenance was a non-issue I’d still need to dump and load these fixtures again and again during development.

What I am looking for

Basically; getting rid of FlatPage model while maintaining contrib.flatpages functionality. I don’t have a clear idea how this should be solved. If there’s a clean way of modifying (like add_to_class) FlatPages to get the information somewhere other than the database I’d prefer that. Maybe the metadata can be inserted to the templates and then a special manager that reads this data would replace the default manager of FlatPages.

If I don’t prefer manual editing over admin functionality for flatpages, how can take the database out of the equation?

Answer 1

Using the direct_to_template generic view would be a lot simpler. You could use the passed in parameters on one view to specify the actual template in urls.py, if you don’t want to add an entry for each page:

r'^foo/(?P<template_name>.+)/$','direct_to_template', {'template': 'foo_index.html'}), 

Then import the template in your foo_index.html:

{% include template_name %}