Snippetology lets you pull text snippets from the database and inject them into your Django templates (or directly into your view code). If text sounds boring, it shouldn't - the snippets can be any HTML content including flash or image tags, regular markup, CSS, Javascript, etc..

This is a very simple but commonly requested CMS feature, where content can be changed dynamically by a trusted non-technical administrator. Snippet text is editable from the regular Django admin panel and the output text appears anywhere you place the matching snippet tag in your template.

A randomizing filter is also included that will let you randomly emit lines from a particular snippet. This can be handy for page taglines or rotating banner ads, etc.

Install

1. Get tarball or the latest via svn http://code.google.com/p/django-snippetology/source/checkout
2. Either run setup.py install or put the inner snippetology folder in your Django project folder or on your PYTHONPATH.
3. Add 'snippetology' to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py
4. manage.py syncdb

Using Snippets

1. Go into your Django admin and create some snippets in the Snippetology section. Careful - the name you give your snippet will be the name you use in your template.
2. Add the command {% load snippets %} toward the top of your template file.
3. To use a snippet add a snippet tag to your template: {% snippet "daily message" %} where "daily message" is an example snippet name.

Randomizing Snippets

The random_line tag will randomly select one line out of a snippet full of lines of text. Blank lines are ignored. To use the randomizing feature:

1. Create a snippet with multiple lines of text.
2. Use the following tag to randomly choose and display a line:

{% filter random_line %}{% snippet "rotating_banner_list" %}{% endfilter %}

Important Notes

Snippetology is appropriate to workgroup sites, intranets, and low volume public websites. Running unmodified on higher volume sites probably isn't a great idea because of the database hits you'd rack up. Caching support and other performance features are in the works but are not a priority at this time. Suffice it to say that if you're not running a high volume website you likely won't experience performance problems with Snippetology.

Similar Apps

Apparently there is a strong desire for named snippets. There are several projects which provide similar functionality that you might find more useful:

• django-flatcontent
• django-chunks
• django-flatblocks
• django-generic-flatblocks