Use WTForms with webapp and Django templates on Google App Engine

Question

I'm trying to use WTForms with webapp without much luck.

I would like to be able to use the form_field templatetag, as shown in the documentation:

{% form_field form.username class="big_text" onclick="do_something()" %}

I've got WTForms installed fine in my application, but its Django template tags isn't working for me. Does anyone have instructions on how to get this installed?

If I can't get this working, I will probably give up and switch to Jinja2 templates. The reason we have kept with Django so far is to limit the number of dependencies as much as possible.

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Here's what I've tried so far:

I've install Django 1.1 locally and enabled it per the documentation.

I tried adding INSTALLED_APPS = ['wtforms.ext.django'] to my settings.py - no effect.

I tried registering the wtforms templatetag manually:.

register = webapp.template.create_template_register()

from wtforms.ext.django.templatetags import wtforms

register.tag('form_field', wtforms.do_form_field)

This gave me an error: InvalidTemplateLibrary: Could not load template library from template_helpers, No module named django.templatetags

So I tried copying and pasting the template tags into my own code, and I got the error TemplateSyntaxError: Could not parse the remainder: ' form.foobar' from 'form_field form.foobar.

However, I don't think the templatetag registration worked, because the error was the same without that code.

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Update: I'm leaving this question up in case someone on the internet can some day answer it, but I switched to Jinja2 and now everything works perfectly. Webapp with Django templates is dead to me. ;-)

Answer 1

I recommend jinja2 templates over django: http://jinja.pocoo.org/ It's based on the django templates but more powerful and easy to use. I don't think it's a good idea to use Django templates without the django stack. Also, if you want a more structured framework, a VERY nice minimalist framework is Flask: http://www.pocoo.org/projects/flask/#flask. I can't praise those two libraries enough. I worked a long time in Django and found this combo to be very refreshing and succinct.

P.S. this should be a very simple process to port over. It took me 10 minutes to port over a webapp site when I just found out about Flask.