Using external URLs in Django's TEMPLATE_DIRS

Question

Django\'s TEMPLATE_DIRS in Settings.py calls for unix style slashes.

Because of this, when I call

get_template(\'some/template.html\')

Answer 1

You don't need to use the template directory is you dont want to. If you have a server that is serving template files, you can simply fetch them remotely using urllib2 and create and render the template with a context manually:

import urllib2
from django.template import Context, Template

tpl_html = urllib2.urlopen("http://mysite.com")
tpl = Template(tpl_html)
return tpl.render(Context({
    'some_variable' : 'some_val',
})

If you are going to do this, you have to incorporate some caching, as for every request to using this template, you need to make an external request. Alternatively you could write this into a custom loader but it will suffer the same limitations.