The core Django philosophy is DRY: do not repeat yourself. This quick tip will save you time and headaches when writing Django templates with page titles.

Let's start off with some assumptions. You have a parent template that you reuse throughout the site. Keep it simple and imagine these are the contents of site.html:

<head>
  <title>
    {% block title %}{% endblock %}
  </title>
</head>
<body>
  {% block body %}{% endblock %}
</body>

Now typically, you would use it with a child template, as shown below in child.html:

{% extends "site.html" %}

{% block title %}My page title{% endblock %}

{% block body %}
<h1>My page title</h1>
<p>My page content</p>
{% endblock %}

Or perhaps, your page content came from the database, as shown below in dyanmic_page.html:

{% extends "site.html" %}

{% block title %}{{ page.title }}{% endblock %}

{% block body %}
<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
<p>{{ page.content }}</p>
{% endblock %}

Simple. But we're repeating ourselves. Notice we wrote My page title twice.

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Fortunately, it turns out that Django actually outputs the contents of a {% block %} tag when you invoke it inside another {% block %} tag.

That means you can remove the duplicate titles, as shown below:

{% extends "site.html" %}

{% block body %}
<h1>{% block title %}My page title{% endblock %}</h1>
<p>My page content</p>
{% endblock %}

Or for the dynamic template, like so:

{% extends "site.html" %}

{% block body %}
<h1>{% block title %}{{ page.title }}{% endblock %}</h1>
<p>{{ page.content }}</p>
{% endblock %}

Simple as that. No more repeating yourself when adding page titles.

Tags:Django