Django: Switching to Jinja2?

Solution 1:

While it's just my own experience, I found converting from Django to Jinja2 to be worthwhile for the following reasons:

1. The design and implementation of Jinja2 seemed more intuitive to me, both as a software developer and template designer;
2. Jinja2 is more extensible (at least in the ways I've sought to extend my template engine);
3. Jinja2 is more flexible in terms of permitting logic-code to be run (but it gives you enough rope to hang yourself with);
4. Jinja2 is regarded as significantly faster (though I haven't done any benchmarks, this is always subject to debate depending on the tests used, and in any event largely irrelevant in the total wait time for a query that has to do DB lookups);
5. Jinja2 gives significantly more helpful error output than Django (i.e. traces to the line number in the template where the error occurred). Edit: According to Dor's comment, Django gives helpful error messages that point to the line and context of a problem, much like Jinja2.

If you haven't had any trouble with Django's template engine, Jinja2's should feel relatively intuitive, if perhaps a bit more polished (or it did to me, at any rate). As well, I found the Coffin project well written and reasonably helpful when converting from Django to Jinja2 – both for its use, and as an example of how to extend Jinja2.

All that being said, Django's template engine is solid and quite capable for most tasks. I believe it's being improved in the next revision of Django, and there is quite a lot of effort to add to its capabilities by quite a number of dedicated developers. As a result there are no worries of it becoming unsupported in the near to medium-term future.

Again, that's just my experience, for what it's worth – I hope that's helpful.

Solution 2:

There's also django-jinja. https://github.com/niwibe/django-jinja

New and nice project. http://niwinz.github.io/django-jinja/latest/

It claims to be a simple and nonobstructive jinja2 integration with Django.