Question

So I’m building an application using django. A few people in my team think I should be using includes in my templates rather than following the blocks/extends paradigm. They argue that:

• Inheritance is too much logic for future maintainers
• Includes are much easier to follow
• We shouldn’t limit future maintenance to “django programmers”

I’d really rather not butcher my application’s templates, so I’m trying to come up with some convincing reasons (for non-django users) as to why inheritance really is the way forward. I’d love to hear some more views on this.

A few reasons I’ve come up with already:

• Much more DRY. Ensures that boilerplate html structures only need to be defined in one place; much less risk of templates getting out of sync

• Keeps content which belongs in templates, in templates, and out of views; for example:

  <title>{% block title %}My Website{% endblock %}</title>

  vs

  <title>{{ pagetitle }}</title>

  This gives the front-end maintainer much more control over the front-end, without having to delve into back-end views

• Front end coders already have to be familiar with the concept of inheritance of extending from a base / overriding defaults; consider the following css:

  .nav {
    color: blue;
  }
  
  .nav.active {
    color: purple;
  }
  

Any good reasoning you can throw into the mix?

Answer 1

Using inheritance makes it easier (at least IMHO) to create a master base.html template and let all of the other pages extends it. This leaves all layout/styling to be specified in that one file, and the rest simply use tags with id and class in a standardized way.

It is good to remember that the argument to extends (as well as include) can be a variable. Our templates/base.html is one line:

{% extends base_template %}

where base_template is set in our master context processor. This, together with a simple admin widget that changes session.base_template, has allowed our designer to create multiple layouts and switch between them with a single click. She absolutely loves it.