Question

I want to make a sidebar for my webapplication. It contains the following content:

• A search bar
• a list of tags
• links to recent posts (with year and month)

I want to include this sidebar in every site/view. So my first guess is that it would belong to a layout.
But it’s also dynamic and as far as i know layouts are static.

How do I avoid redundancy in my views/layouts and still have the sidebar on every site?

Answer 1

To have context data passed to multiple templates you have different options in django; You could either:

• Make a Template Tag which can pull in the relevant data and render it and reuse it in every template you need to (or just insert it in a base template and use template inheritance).

• Use a context processor: It will be called with every request and add data to every view’s context that uses RequestContext.

• Using Django’s class based views you could have all your views inherit from a base view which adds data to your context.

If you need data from your database I would rather go with using a template tag than using a context processor as it will be called for every view.