Max Cutler

“Created documentation for ‘get’ template tag.” Such a simple commit message, almost innocuous. But to get there, it took a full day of work writing, plus weeks and months creating the code to write about. The ‘get’ template tag is one of the more important components of Courant News, and is something relatively unique (to our knowledge). It allows template authors to fetch their content from templates without having to write any code (Python or otherwise), maintaining the logic-design boundary in Django templates.

I gave a sneak peek at the get tag in my first blog post about Courant News templates, but now I’ve written the full set of documentation regarding its usage and the tools for developers to hook into and customize its functionality. It is quite long, and I don’t feel it would be appropriate for me to replicate it here in text form. I would have to convert it from reStructred Text formatting to WordPress formatting, and then there would be this copy of the documentation floating around the search-able internet in perpetuity.

Instead, since our documentation site won’t be ready for public access until later this week, I am attaching it here for reading as a graphic for those interested. Unfortunately, the styling for the default Sphinx documentation theme doesn’t do the greatest job at demarking different header levels; we will be attempting to remedy this with our custom theme which is in the process of being built. Until then, feel free to spend some time reading about the Courant News ‘get’ template tag (click to enlarge):

It’s been a labor of love, I hope you find it useful. Tomorrow’s post will likely also be a sample of the documentation, probably for our enhancements to the Django cache framework. If you have specific questions concerning the ‘get’ tag, or if you have a topic that you’d like me to cover in the next few days, please just leave a message in the comments.