== I should find some good small packages for templates and forms for CGIs I [[recently wrote ../web/NoNewTemplateLanguages]] about how we shouldn't be making up new (web) templating packages but instead should just use existing ones. This leads me to admit that I have a little problem here with Python, in that I don't currently have one of these that I'd use. Well, sort of. If I was to write another relatively substantial web application, I'd unquestionably use Django (and thus I'd use Django's templating system and form handling). It's what I know, it works, and we already have [[one Django web app DjangoORMDesignPuzzleII]] so adding a second is relatively low overhead. But the problem with Django (and other big systems) is that their deployment story is kind of heavyweight and a pain in the ass. We have a number of small, simple things that are easiest to handle as just CGIs, and we'll probably get more. (This may be over-estimating the hassles of deploying a second ``mod_wsgi'' based thing when we already have one, but wrangling Django kind of makes me grumpy in the first place.) This means that I should really find an existing Python templating system that is right-sized for use in CGIs, meaning that it is not too big itself, does not have big dependencies, starts up relatively fast, and ideally can take its templates from embedded strings in the program instead of loading them from the filesystem. I haven't previously looked in this area (partly because Django met what I thought of as all of my needs here), so I'm not familiar with what's available. (For simple CGI-like things, embedded the templates in the CGI's Python code makes for easier deployments, by which I mean that the whole CGI will be just one file and I'll copy it around.) In the same spirit of 'don't roll your own half-solution when other people have done better ones', I should also get an existing package to handle forms for my CGIs. This is likely to interact with the choice of templating system, since you often want to use your template system to automatically render forms in clever ways instead of basically embedding fixed HTML for them. Probably I want to start my investigation with, say, [[the Python wiki's entry on web frameworks https://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks/]]. I'm going to not mention any project names here for now, since what comes to mind is basically influenced by the project's PR (or lack of it), not any actual knowledge on my part. PS: This walks back from my views on [[templates versus simple HTML TemplatingVsSimpleHTML]]. I still believe them, but I also believe that it's probably not worth fighting city hall in most cases. A full template system may be vast overkill for many things, but there's a great virtue in standardizing on a single solution that can be learned once and is then familiar to people. (Templates also have the virtue that the HTML and the fixed text content are both obvious, so it's easy for people to find it and then make simple brute force modification because, for example, we've decided to change some names we use to refer to our systems in order to confuse users less. You don't even really need to know the templating system for this, you just have to be able to find the text.)