id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc,stage,has_patch,needs_docs,needs_tests,needs_better_patch,easy,ui_ux 2949,Django's templating engine too tightly tied to TEMPLATE_DIRS in the settings module,lerouxb@…,nobody,"Django's templating engine is too tightly tied to the settings module. Specifically the loaders. This affects the template loaders as well as what is in django.template.loader_tags. I want to be able to set the path to a directory that contains the templates I want to render at runtime. Due to the nature of my project, I cannot just add every possibility to TEMPLATE_DIRS and I can definitely not follow a convention based off sub-directories of a specific parent directory. These ""skins"" (where skin is a directory containing templates) do not live parallel to each other and shouldn't be able to extend each other. The basic thing I'm looking for is to be able to load a template from a specific, arbitrary path and then tags like extends and include should load templates from the same directory. In fact, I want to add custom filters that can take the name of a template as a parameter to render things with and this should load the relevant template from the correct directory. I've been looking through the code and django.template.loaders.filesystem.get_template_sources() takes a parameter template_dirs that defaults to None, but this never gets set and it looks like it will always default to settings.TEMPLATE_DIRS. django.template.loader_tags.ExtendsNode takes a parameter called template_dirs that defaults to None, but this also never gets set and it just uses the loader directly (inside get_parent) to find the template source. All this means that the template engine is tied to TEMPLATE_DIRS in the settings module and I can't just tell the template loaders to load templates from arbitrary locations and expect the other parts of the system to play along. Has anyone looked into this before or have ideas on how to fix it? I don't mind writing code, but I'm a bit worried about hacking at the source and then I have to maintain it myself. I've been considering writing my own loader.py and loader_tags.py that contains a convenience function that will store template_dirs inside the context the first time it is called and then if it gets called without template_dirs (ie from ExtendsNode) it will read the value from the context. It will then reuse the stuff in __init__.py, context.py, defaultfilters.py and defaulttags.py. Any comments?",enhancement,closed,Template system,dev,normal,worksforme,tplrf-patched,,Design decision needed,0,0,0,0,0,0