View support¶
Using the view¶
You render the meta tags by including a meta.html
partial template in your
view templates. This template will only render meta tags if it can find a
meta
object in the context, so you can safely include it in your base
template to have it render on all your pages.
The meta.html
template expects to find an object called meta
in
the template context which contains any of the following attributes:
- use_og
- use_twitter
- use_facebook
- use_googleplus
- use_title_tag
- title
- description
- keywords
- url
- image
- object_type
- site_name
- twitter_site
- twitter_creator
- twitter_card
- facebook_app_id
- locale
- extra_props
- extra_custom_props
In all cases, if the attribute is not set/empty, the matching metadata/property is not rendered.
Meta object¶
The core of django-meta is the Meta
class. Although you can prepare the
metadata for the template yourself, this class can make things somewhat
easier.
To set up a meta object for use in templates, simply instantiate it with the properties you want to use:
from meta.views import Meta
meta = Meta(
title="Sam's awesome ponies",
description='Awesome page about ponies',
keywords=['pony', 'ponies', 'awesome'],
extra_props = {
'viewport': 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0'
}
'extra_custom_props': [
('http-equiv', 'Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'),
]
)
When the time comes to render the template, simply include the instance as
'meta'
context variable.
Meta
also accept an (optional) request
argument to pass the current
request, which is used to retrieve the SITE_ID
if it’s not in the settings.
The Meta
instances have the same properties as the keys listed in the
Using the view section. For convenience, some of the properties are ‘smart’,
and will modify values you set. These properties are:
- keywords
- url
- image
For brevity, we will only discuss those here.
Meta.keywords¶
When you assign keywords either via the constructor, or by assigning an
iterable to the keywords
property, it will be cleaned up of all duplicates
and returned as a set
. If you have specified the META_INCLUDE_KEYWORDS,
the resulting set will also include them. If you omit this argument when
instantiating the object, or if you assign None
to the keywords
property, keywords defined by META_DEFAULT_KEYWORDS setting will be used
instead.
Meta.url¶
Setting the url behaves differently depending on whether you are passsing a
path or a full URL. If your URL starts with 'http'
, it will be used
verbatim (not that the actual validity of the url is not checked so
'httpfoo'
will be considered a valid URL). If you use an absolute or
relative path, domain and protocol parts would be prepended to the URL. Here’s
an example:
m = Meta(url='/foo/bar')
m.url # returns 'http://example.com/foo/bar'
The actual protocol and domain are dependent on the META_SITE_PROTOCOL and
META_SITE_DOMAIN settings. If you wish to use the Django’s sites contrib app
to calculate the domain, you can either set the META_USE_SITES setting to
True
, or pass the use_sites
argument to the constructor:
m = Meta(url='/foo/bar', use_sites=True)
Note that using the sites app will trigger database queries and/or cache hits, and it is therefore disabled by default.
Meta.image¶
The image
property behaves the same way as url
property with one
notable difference. This property treats absolute and relative paths
differently. It will place relative paths under the META_IMAGE_URL.
View mixin¶
As a convenience to those who embrace the Django’s class-based views, django-meta includes a mixin that can be used with your views. Using the mixin is very simple:
from django.views.generic import View
from meta.views import MetadataMixin
class MyView(MetadataMixin, View):
title = 'Some page'
description = 'This is an awesome page'
image = 'img/some_page_thumb.gif'
url = 'some/page/'
....
The mixin sports all properties listed in the Using the view section with a
few additional bells and whistles that make working with them easier. The mixin
will return an instance of the Meta
class (see Meta object) as meta
context variable. This is, in turn, used in the partial template to render the
meta tags (see Rendering meta tags).
Each of the properties on the mixin can be calculated dynamically by using the
MetadataMixin.get_meta_PROPERTYNAME
methods, where PROPERTYNAME
is the
name of the property you wish the calculate at runtime. Each method will
receive a context
keyword argument containig the request context.
For example, to calculate the description dynamically, you may use the mixin like so:
class MyView(MetadataMixin, SingleObjectMixin, View):
...
def get_meta_description(self, context):
return self.get_object().description
There are two more methods that you can overload in your view classes, and
those are get_domain
and get_protocol
.
Reference template¶
See below the basic reference template:
{% load sekizai_tags meta %}
<html {% render_block 'html_extra' %}>
<head {% meta_namespaces %}>
{{ meta.og_description }}
{% include "meta/meta.html" %}
</head>
<body>
{% block content %}
{% endblock content %}
</body>
</html>
Properties¶
use_og¶
This key contains a boolean value, and instructs the template to render the OpenGraph properties. These are usually used by FaceBook to get more information about your site’s pages.
use_twitter¶
This key contains a boolean value, and instructs the template to render the Twitter properties. These are usually used by Twitter to get more information about your site’s pages.
use_facebook¶
This key contains a boolean value, and instructs the template to render the Facebook properties. These are usually used by Facebook to get more information about your site’s pages.
use_googleplus¶
This key contains a boolean value, and instructs the template to render the Google+. These are usually used by Google to get more information about your site’s pages.
use_title_tag¶
This key contains a boolean value, and instructs the template to render the
<title></title>
tag. In the simple case, you use <title></title>
tag
in the templates where you can override it, but if you want to generate it
dynamically in the views, you can set this property to True
.
title¶
This key is used in the og:title
OpenGraph property if use_og
is
True
, twitter:title
if use_twitter
is True
,
itemprop="title"
if use_googleplus
is True
or <title></title>
tag
if use_title_tag
is True
.
description¶
This key is used to render the description
meta tag as well as the
og:description
and twitter:description
property.
keywords¶
This key should be an iterable containing the keywords for the page. It is used
to render the keywords
meta tag.
url¶
This key should be the full URL of the page. It is used to render the
og:url
, twitter:url
, itemprop=url
property.
image¶
This key should be the full URL of an image to be used with the og:image
,
twitter:image
, itemprop=mage
property.
object_type¶
This key is used to render the og:type
property.
site_name¶
This key is used to render the og:site_name
property.
twitter_site¶
This key is used to render the twitter:site
property.
twitter_creator¶
This key is used to render the twitter:creator
property.
twitter_card¶
This key is used to render the twitter:card
property.
facebook_app_id¶
This key is used to render the fb:app_id
property.
locale¶
This key is used to render the og:locale
property.
extra_props¶
A dictionary of extra optional properties:
{
'foo': 'bar',
'key': 'value'
}
...
<meta name="foo" content="bar">
<meta name="key" content="value">
extra_custom_props¶
A list of tuples for rendering custom extra properties:
[
('key', 'foo', 'bar')
('property', 'name', 'value')
]
...
<meta name="foo" content="bar">
<meta property="name" content="value">