How can I pass data to any template from any view in Django?

Question

Like a good little coder, all of my Django templates inherit from a base.html. Now I would like to add some functionality to the base to always show some interesting things.

Answer 1

For this I use context processors. For example, if I want get variable MEDIA_URL for each view, I define context_processors.py like this:

def media_url(request):
    from django.conf import settings
    return {'MEDIA_URL': settings.MEDIA_URL}

in settings.py you must have

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    ....
    'django.core.context_processors.request',
    'myaplication.context_processors.menuitems',
)

in view you must have render_to_response and context_instance=RequestContext(request) For example:

def my_view(request):
return render_to_response('base.html',{},
                              context_instance=RequestContext(request))