Copyblock
=========
Copyblock came out of a desire of mine to separate the copy for a site
I’m working on from the site templates. Things like welcome messages,
intro copy for forms, etc. This is copy I’d like to be able to tweak
easily over time without having to redeploy the entire site to make it
happen. What I wanted was a system kindof like gettext, but without .po
files, the weird syntax, and a separete app to generate the right files.
What I wanted was really simple: a directory of text files, optionally
in `Markdown`_, that could be inserted into my app templates with a
template tag. That’s what Copyblock does.
Installation
------------
From Pypi:
::
% pip install django-copyblock
From `Github`_:
::
% pip install -e git://github.com/sivy/django-copyblock.git#egg=copyblock
Usage
-----
Create a root directory for your copyblock files:
::
% mkdir copy/dir
Add this path to your settings file:
::
COPYBLOCK_ROOT='path/to/your/copy/dir'
In your templates:
::
{% copyblock filename %}
This will do the following:
- Look for copy/dir/filename.markdown
- Run the file filename.markdown through markdown
- Cache the output for future lookups
- Insert the output in the rendered template
Right now, copyblock only does markdown. If your copy is not in markdown
(plain text), you can pass in the ``nomarkdown`` parameter to the
template tag:
::
{% copyblock filename nomarkdown %}
Also, if you don’t want to use the in-memory cache (load copy from file
every time, good for copy editing), pass in the ``nocache`` parameter:
::
{% copyblock filename nocache %}
When working on site copy, it can be helpful to turn off the Copyblock
cache completely with (in ``settings.py``):
::
COPYBLOCK_CACHE=False
Serving Copyblock Files
-----------------------
Copyblock provides a simple app that will serve Markdown files in your
COPYBLOCK\_ROOT on the url endpoint of your choosing:
In ``settings.py``, set the template name (in your main application) to
render markdown files through:
::
COPYBLOCK_TEMPLATE='template.html'
This template should contain an ``output`` template variable, like so:
::
{{ output|safe }}
In ``urls.py``, add:
::
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^site/(?P<path>.+)', include('copyblock.urls', namespace="copyblock", app_name='copyblock')),
)
The path can be whatever you choose.
Now, accessing http://mysite.example.com/site/name-of-markdown-file in
your browser will load the content of the
@TODO
-----
- Add support for other text formats, or even HTML (suggestions,
request? steve@wallrazer.com)
- A view that will render any file in ``settings.COPYBLOCK_ROOT``
through the site’s base template (``base.html``) under a path
determined by ``urls.py``. IE, ``/path/to/copy/dir/foo.markdown``
would be viewable at ``yoursite.com/somepath/foo``. Or, something
like that. [DONE]
.. _Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown
.. _Github: http://github.comsivy/django-copyblock
