Time to display some data! Django gives us some helpful, built-in template tags for that.
You see, in HTML, you can't really put Python code, because browsers don't understand it. They only know HTML. We know that HTML is rather static, while Python is much more dynamic.
Django template tags allow us to transfer Python-like things into HTML, so you can build dynamic websites faster and easier. Yikes!
In the previous chapter we gave our template a list of posts in a posts
variable. Now we will display it in HTML.
To print a variable in Django template, we use double curly brackets with the variable's name inside, like this:
{{ posts }}
Try this in your blog/templates/blog/post_list.html
template (replace everything between the second <div></div>
tags with {{ posts }}
line), save the file and refresh the page to see the results:
As you can see, all we've got is this:
[<Post: My second post>, <Post: My first post>]
This means that Django understand it as a list of objects. Remember from Introduction to Python how we can display lists? Yes, with for loops! In a Django template, you do them this way:
{% for post in posts %}
{{ post }}
{% endfor %}
Try this in your template.
It works! But we want them to be displayed in a way we created earlier in the Introduction to HTML chapter - like the static posts we put there before. You can mix HTML and template tags. Our body
will look like this:
<div>
<h1><a href="/">Django Girls Blog</a></h1>
</div>
{% for post in posts %}
<div>
<p>published: {{ post.published_date }}</p>
<h1><a href="">{{ post.title }}</a></h1>
<p>{{ post.text }}</p>
</div>
{% endfor %}
Everything you put between {% for %}
and {% endfor %}
will be repeated for each object in the list. Refresh your page:
Have you noticed that we used a slightly different notation this time {{ post.title }}
or {{ post.text }}
. We are accessing data in each of the fields defined in our Post
model.
Congrats! Now go ahead and try adding a new post in your Django admin (remember to add published_date!), then refresh your page to see if the post appears there.
Works like a charm? We're proud! Treat yourself something sweet, you have earned it :)