Chapter 3. Using Templates in Our Headlines Project

In the last chapter, we saw one way of combining static HTML with dynamic content for creating a web page. But it's messy, and we don't want to hack away at Python strings for building our web pages. Mixing HTML and Python is not ideal for a few reasons: for one, it means if we ever want to change static text, such as that which appears in our headings, we have to edit our Python files, which also involves reloading these files into Apache. If we hire frontend developers to work on HTML, we run the risk of them breaking the unfamiliar Python code by mistake, and it's far more difficult to structure any other frontend code such as JavaScript and CSS correctly. Ideally, we should aim for complete segregation between the frontend and backend components. We can achieve this to a large extent using Jinja, but as with most aspects of life, some compromise will be necessary.

By the end of this chapter, we'll have extended our application to display more than a single headline for the chosen publication. We'll display several articles for each publication, each one having a link to the original article, and our logic and view components will largely be separated. In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Introducing Jinja
• Basic use of Jinja templates
• Advanced use of Jinja templates