Page contexts

When rendering a page, it’s sometimes useful to have a context - variables and values which can be used to control templates.

For example, lets assume we have a blog.html Django template which looks like:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block header %}

  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>
  <p>By {{ author }}</p>
{% endblock %}

{% block content %}
  This block will be replaced by the markdown content
{% endblock %}

{% block article %}
  or we could put the content in a different block like this:<hr>
  {{ content }}
{% endblock %}

This page template uses several template variables - title, author and content.

We can define this context in the page file between two --- lines, which must appear at the very top of the document:

---
extends: blog.html
title: Hello world
author: Richard
---
Page contents

This will look familiar to you if you have used other static site generators - django-nanopages uses a similar approach to front matter in Jekyll, Hugo or 11ty.

Configure nanopages

The variables defined are then available in the context for the base template. There are some special keys:

extends - the name of the base template - file content will be put in the {% block content %} if it exists. Defaults to "base.html".
content - django-nanopages will set this to the markdown file content, so do not set this yourself.

Context languages

The default context format is a simple key: value pairs, where all values are strings without newlines - it is not YAML.

If pyyaml is installed, you can specify the YAML context parser:

---yaml
extends: blog.html
title: "Hello world"
lede: |
  In this article we explore the warmth and positivity
  that a simple greeting can bring.
authors:
  - Richard
  - Murgatroyd
  - Persephone
---
Page contents

For this to work, you will need to install pyyaml first:

pip install pyyaml
# or
pip install django-nanopages[full]

You can also use JSON, where the top level are key/value pairs for an object:

---json
"extends": "blog.html",
"title": "Hello world",
"authors": ["Richard", "Murgatroyd", "Persephone"]
---
Page contents

HTML files

HTML files are treated as Django templates, so you should manually extend a template. You can then override blocks and use template tags as you would any template.