Now that we have some sample data to work with we can finally start creating the templates we need to get the site running.
Note
For more information on what templates Ella uses and what context is passed in, see Views.
First we will create a template rendering a category: page/category.html. This is a default template that will be used for all categories if their specific template (one with their path) isn’t found. The two most important variables in the context we want to use is {{ category }} containing the Category model itself and {{ listings }} containing a list of Listing objects for that category ordered by publish_from and/or priority.
The basic template will look like:
<h1>Welcome to category {{ category.title }}</h1>
<p>{{ category.description }}</p>
{% for listing in listings %}
<p>
<a href="{{ listing.get_absolute_url }}">{{ listing.target.title }}</a>
{{ listing.target.description|safe }}
</p>
{% endfor %}
That will render the category title, description and a list of objects published in that category. Upon accessing / you should then see the name of the category and the article you created in previous step.
Note
{{ listing.target }} gives you access to the Publishable instance. It gives you an instance of Publishable even is the object can be a subclass, like (in our case) Article. This is done for performance reasons, but if you want the access to the actual object in it’s proper class, you can use {{ listing.target.target }} at the cost of an additional DB query.
This template represents the archive, it gets the same context as page/category.html and the same code can be used. We will use the same code:
{% extends "page/category.html" %}
As with page/category.html, page/object.html is a fallback template that will be used for rendering any object if more suitable template isn’t found. In real life we will probably have different templates for different content types, but to verify the concept and get us started a simple template should be enough:
<h1>{{ object.title }}</h1>
<p>Published on {{ placement.publish_from|date }} in category: <a href="{{ category.get_absolute_url }}">{{ category }}</a></p>
{{ object.description|safe }}
This template will have access to the actual Publishable subclass instance (Article in our case), as opposed to page/category.html and page/listing.html which only gets instance of Publishable by default.
By importing handler404 and handler500 in our urls.py, we turned over the control of error pages to Ella. This means that we need to create two additional templates: page/404.html:
<h1>Oops, nothing here</h1>
and page/500.html:
<h1>If you see this, let us please know how you did it, thanks!</h1>
Now that we have a set of rudimentary templates, we can try doing something useful with them.