Problem: Sharing templates between backbonejs and django. I found that Backbone never needs to actually render out a whole page, only specific views, this allows me to render those views with the same templating language. If it is initial pageload, Backbone js just binds events and allows SEO and a faster page load time, as well as the page func…

mustache.py

from django import template
from django.conf import settings
import pystache

# Needed to register a custom template tag
register = template.Library()

# Decorator to register a tag that takes the context
@register.simple_tag(takes_context=True)
# Function which takes the django context class and the template string
def mustache(context, template, locale):

# This can be modified to whatever template directory you want to hold your mustache templates
# Opens the file for reading as a raw string, cannot use django's get_template or render_to_string methods
# Because they attempt to render the context and actually return a class which pystache cannot use
  template = open(settings.TEMPLATE_DIRS[0]+"/"+template, 'r').read()

# To retrieve the context passed and not the class info from django, we convert the context to a list
# After converted to a list, if the context is being passed from base, we want the first item in the list
# If the context is passed from a block, we want the second item in the list, from an include the third
  
# In each template load in the custom tag: {% load mustache %}  
  context_map = {
      'base': list(context)[0], # {% mustache "_came_from_base_template.html" 'base' %}
      'block': list(context)[1], # {% mustache "_came_from_block.html" 'include' %}
      'include': list(context)[2] # {% mustache "_came_from_include.html" 'include' %}
  }

# Return the rendered template with pystache
  return  pystache.render(template, context_map[locale])

If you are using this in an extend:

{% extends "__base.html" %}
{% load mustache %}
{% block header %}
{% mustache "_mustache_test.html" %}
{% include "_header.html" %}
{% endblock %}

This is currently being modified to work with templates coming from blocks insid of includes.

See this gist: https://gist.github.com/michaelBenin/5753378