Alternatives

This document lists some projects which provide similar or complementary functionalities.

django-floppyforms

django-floppyforms [1] deals with form widgets, which are not in the scope of django-formrenderingtools. The two projects offer complementary functionalities.

Gsoc2011: Revised form rendering

In 2011, the Revised form rendering project [2], during Google Summer of Code, tried to:

  1. merge django-floppyforms [1] in core Django;
  2. add similar functionality for form layouts in core Django.

Part one was done pretty quick.

Part two raised lots of discussions. The resulting plan was quite big. And (as far as I know) didn’t succeed.

Even if django-formrenderingtools introduced the #2 basic functionalities more than one year before, it wasn’t well known (I guess it remains quite invisible as of July 2012) and wasn’t considered as a candidate for implementation. It was mentioned in discussions. Some concepts influenced Gsoc proposal. But not more.

The Gsoc ended, Django 1.4 was released in 2012. As of July 2012, there is no template-based form rendering in core Django.

So, django-formrenderingtools keeps on being an option...

Note

One big point in discussions during Gsoc was about performances: using templates can generate many disk access and some overhead. django-floppyforms [1] has benchmarks and implemented optimizations. django-formrenderingtools has none currently, but contributions are welcome!

django-crispy-forms

django-crispy-forms [3] is about form layouts too. The main part is in Python code: helpers and layout classes (configuration).

It could be an interesting alternative when you don’t mind the layouts to be configured in Python code, i.e. when your web designers can contribute to Python code or when your developers do the web design.

More?

Of course there are other projects! As an example, around the Gsoc2011, some “proof-of-concept” projects appear.

You can find some of them at http://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/forms/