Can't use {{MEDIA_URL}} in Django Flatpages?

Question

A rather simple question which I will elaborate on if needed in order to solve the problem.

I attempted to use a simple call to {{ MEDIA_URL }} in order to show an image on an About Us Django flatpage, but it seems the flatpage is ignoring the fact that it is a Django variable and simply taking {{MEDIA_URL}} as text?

I supplied: <img src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}images/static/Deb-and-Diana-About-Us.jpg" alt="Deb &amp; Diana Portrait" width="300" height="384" align="left"> but when the template is rendered it doesn't append the MEDIA_URL where it should, it just leaves the words {{ MEDIA_URL }}.

Am I missing an import or something? The default.html which governs the flatpage extends my usual template so I see no reason why this should fail, unless I don't understand what flatpages have access to?

Answer 1

You can access the MEDIA_URL in flat pages via a templatetag. Look at this snippet It searches for {{ MEDIA_URL }} and replaces it with that found in your settings.

from django import template
from django.conf import settings
from django.template.defaultfilters import stringfilter

register = template.Library()

@register.filter
@stringfilter
def media_url(value):
    """Searches for {{ MEDIA_URL }} and replaces it with the MEDIA_URL from settings.py"""
    return value.replace('{{ MEDIA_URL }}', settings.MEDIA_URL)
media_url.is_safe = True

And the usage:

{% load media_url %}
{{ flatpage.content|media_url }}

To set up, drop the above code into a file called media_url.py in your templatetags directory in one of your INSTALLED_APPS, and add the filter to your flatpages template like so