Question

In a django app, I need to create twitter user profile urls with following structure like:

• example.com/<username>
• example.com/<username>/friends
• example.com/<username>/blog
• example.com/<username>/some-page
• example.com/<username>/some-other-page

My urls.py:

urlpatterns = patterns('profiles.views',
    url(r'^(?P<account_name>[a-zA-Z0-0_.-]+)/$', 'show_profile', name='profiles_show_profile'),
    url(r'^(?P<account_name>[a-zA-Z0-0_.-]+)/friends/$', 'show_friends', name='profiles_show_blog'),
    url(r'^(?P<account_name>[a-zA-Z0-0_.-]+)/blog/$', 'show_blog', name='profiles_show_blog'),
)

My first problem is that while example.com/<username> works fine example.com/<username>/any-other-page does not. They all end up at show_profile view instead of their own view.

Note: Everything works fine if I make urls change the url structure to example.com/user/<username>

What am I doing wrong here? Please advise.

Secondly, I would like guidance on django best practices(pitfalls, gotchas etc) in dealing with url schemes where first part is itself is variable.

Thanks

Answer 1

I don’t see why your URLs aren’t working. You can try moving the first pattern to the end, so that other patterns have a chance to match first. The problem you’re describing sounds like example.com/user/any-page, the pattern is matching “user/any-page” as the account name. The regex you show wouldn’t do that, but maybe your actual code is slightly different?