Easy macros for your coding

django-macros is a free system utility program that enables you to easily set up macros for your Django templates. Developed by Nick Lourie, this handy tool is designed as a library for repeated block tags in case the built-in tags aren’t working properly or they’re not functioning in a specific way. Take note that this is simply a toolkit of sorts and will not automate anything if you don’t set up the right commands.

A handy library

Django—also spelled as “django”—is a Python-based free and open-source web framework that aims to make the creation of complex database-driven websites much easier. It emphasizes the reusability and extensibility of components, fewer codes to deal with, low coupling, rapid development, and the principle of avoiding writing things over and over. Thus, this framework has a tag feature for creating and editing templates. However, this doesn’t always work the way you’d want it to.

If you’re having trouble with this, you can try and use django-macros. With it, you can create macros that will accept positional and keyword arguments and use repeated block tags for your templates. This tool has two template tag libraries: one for creating macros within templates and one for repeating block tags. When you first install it, you have to manually set up the macros and repeated blocks using the instructions provided on the program’s download site. 

This tool isn’t intuitive in terms of tutorials but it does come with other cool features. You can extend the syntax using this and also be more explicit in the commands so as to avoid any errors. While there’s not a lot else that this tag library offers, it at least makes Django so much more versatile and user-friendly compared to when you only had to rely on tags.

Find the tutorial online

All in all, django-macros is a highly versatile tool that’s recommended for any developers using Django. It doesn’t have a built-in tutorial so you will have to rely on the documentation supplied by the developer on the download site. However, it’s still a convenient system utility to have if you often use the base web framework and need templates to work in a specific manner without constant rewriting codes.