django-floppyforms

django-floppyforms is an application that gives you full control of the output of forms rendering. The forms API and features are exactly the same as Django’s, the key difference is that fields and widgets are rendered in templates instead of using string interpolation, giving you full control of the output using Django templates.

The widgets API allows you to customize and extend the widgets behaviour, making it very easy to define custom widgets. The default widgets are very similar to the default Django widgets, except that they implement some nice features of HTML5 forms, such as the placeholder and required attribute, as well as the new <input> types. For more information, read this if you haven’t yet.

The form rendering API is a set of template tags that lets you render forms using custom layouts. This is very similar to Django’s as_p, as_ul or as_table, except that you can customize and add layouts to your convenience.

The source code is hosted on github.

Installation

As a requirement of django-floppyforms, you will need to have Django in version 1.4 or higher installed and use Python 2.6 or newer. Python 3 and PyPy are supported!

Two-step process to install django-floppyforms:

• pip install django-floppyforms
• Add 'floppyforms' to your INSTALLED_APPS

When you’re done you can jump to the usage section. For the impatient reader, there’s also an examples section.

Using django-floppyforms

• Usage
  • Forms
  • ModelForms
• Provided widgets
  • Default widgets for form fields
  • Extra widgets
  • Other (HTML5) widgets
• Customization
  • Override default templates
  • Custom widgets with custom templates
  • Adding more template variables
  • Altering the widget’s attrs
• Widgets reference
• GeoDjango widgets
  • Setting up
  • Widget types
  • Customization
  • Examples
• Form layouts
  • Using form layouts
  • Customizing the layout template
  • Rendering multiple forms
  • Built-in layouts
  • Create custom layouts
• Template tags
  • form
  • formconfig
  • formfield
  • formrow
  • widget
• Differences with django.forms
  • HTML 5 forms!
  • ModelForms
  • help_text values are autoescaped by default
  • TEMPLATE_STRING_IF_INVALID caveats
  • Getting back Django’s behaviour
• Example widgets
  • A date picker
  • An autofocus input
  • A slider
  • A placeholder with fallback
  • An image clearable input with thumbnail
• Layout example with Bootstrap

• Changelog
  • 1.6.2
  • 1.6.1
  • 1.6.0
  • 1.5.2
  • 1.5.1
  • 1.5.0
  • 1.4.1
  • 1.4.0
  • 1.3.0
  • 1.2.0
  • 1.1.1
  • 1.1
  • 1.0
  • 0.4

Getting help

Feel free to join the #django-floppyforms IRC channel on freenode.

Why the name?

• There aren’t enough packages with silly names in the Django community. So, here’s one more.
• The name reflects the idea that a widget can take any kind of shape, if that makes any sense.

Performance

Each time a widget is rendered, there is a template inclusion. To what extent does it affect performance? You can try with this little script:

import timeit

django = """from django import forms

class DjangoForm(forms.Form):
    text = forms.CharField()
    slug = forms.SlugField()
    some_bool = forms.BooleanField()
    email = forms.EmailField()
    date = forms.DateTimeField()
    file_ = forms.FileField()

rendered = DjangoForm().as_p()"""

flop = """import floppyforms as forms

class FloppyForm(forms.Form):
    text = forms.CharField()
    slug = forms.SlugField()
    some_bool = forms.BooleanField()
    email = forms.EmailField()
    date = forms.DateTimeField()
    file_ = forms.FileField()

rendered = FloppyForm().as_p()"""

def time(stmt):
    t = timeit.Timer(stmt=stmt)
    return t.timeit(number=1000)

print "Plain django:", time(django)
print "django-floppyforms:", time(flop)

The result varies if you’re doing template caching or not. To put it simply, here is the average time for a single iteration on a MacBookPro @ 2.53GHz.

Method	Time without template caching	Time with template caching
Plain Django	1.63973999023 msec	1.6320669651 msec
django-floppyforms	9.05481505394 msec	3.0161819458 msec

Even with template caching, the rendering time is doubled. However the impact is probably not noticeable since rendering the form above takes 3 milliseconds instead of 1.6: it still takes no time :). The use of template caching in production is, of course, encouraged.