django-coat

Django-coat is a powerful media files handling plugin that has been designed specifically for Django. The plugin can be easily installed with easy_install/pip or from source code. Once installed, the two setup steps are straightforward and consist of adding 'coat' to the project's INSTALLED_APPS and adding 'from coat.settings import *' to the project's settings file.

The plugin's main feature is the {% coat %} template tag. This tag accepts a filename relative to MEDIA_URL and an optional string of flags. Upon request, the plugin returns a compiled version of the requested file's filename with a cache-aware tag. The tag is 'something suffix' of the file URL, which can be created using different strategies that fit the most frequent use-cases.

The file compiler is another feature of this plugin. It is the action of processing source media files with external programs. These programs can compress, translate, or do anything they want with the source files. The results of this processing are then stored in the file system, and the web server can serve them.

Here is a basic usage example of the {% coat %} template tag: {% load coat %}



If MEDIA_URL is equal to '/media/', the tag will produce:



Available flags for the template tag include 'no-tag,' which does not append cache-aware tags, and 'absolute,' which forces an absolute URL.

The plugin also comes with available settings that users can configure to fit their needs. Some of the settings include the filename pattern for compiled media files, an absolute path to the directory where compiled files will be stored, compiler keys for source media files extensions, and the tagger function with filename as an argument.

Overall, django-coat is an excellent plugin for Django that offers significant benefits for media file handling. It's a must-try for developers who want to add an efficient media files handling feature to their Django projects.