According to {% load %} you can load templatetags that are in subdirectories, e.g. {% load news.blah %}. This didn't work for me; I kept getting errors.
Applying the below patch seems to work. I don't know why taglib.split('.')[-1]) was done in the first place? It's been like this for as far back as I could trace the revisions in on this Trac. A related ticket might be #372.
Index: django/template/defaulttags.py
===================================================================
--- django/template/defaulttags.py (revision 8271)
+++ django/template/defaulttags.py (working copy)
@@ -792,7 +792,7 @@
for taglib in bits[1:]:
# add the library to the parser
try:
- lib = get_library("django.templatetags.%s" % taglib.split('.')[-1])
+ lib = get_library("django.templatetags.%s" % taglib)
parser.add_library(lib)
except InvalidTemplateLibrary, e:
raise TemplateSyntaxError, "'%s' is not a valid tag library: %s" % (taglib, e)
