Django urls straight to html template

Question

Learning django & python.

Just set up a new site after doing the tutorial. Now for arguments sake say I want to add a bunch of About us, FAQ basic html pages with ve

Answer 1

Write a url which grabs the static pages you're interested in

url(r'^(?Pabout|faq|press|whatever)/$', 'myapp.staticpage', name='static-pages')

The staticpage view function in myapp

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template
from django.http import Http404

def staticpage(request, page_name):
    # Use some exception handling, just to be safe
    try:
        return direct_to_template(request, '%s.html' % (page_name, ))
    except TemplateDoesNotExist:
        raise Http404

Of course, you need to follow a naming convention for your templates, but this pattern can be expanded upon as needed.

This is better than the .+\.html pattern because it will treat templates which don't exist as 404s, whereas .+\.html will blow up with 500 errors if the template doesn't exist.