Django shared template

Answer 1

I think you're looking for this tutorial Chapter 4 of the Django book: The Django Template System.

See block tags and template inheritance.

Answer 2

In your python code:

context['books'] = blah blah # Make a list of books somehow.
return render_to_response('popular_books.html', context)

In popular_books.html:

<p>Look, books:</p>
{% for book in books %}
    {% include "book.html" %}
{% endfor %}

Finally, in book.html:

<p>I am a book, my name is {{book.name}}</p>

There are more interesting ways to modularize, such as creating a custom tag, so that you could, for example:

<p>Look, books:</p>
{% for b in books %}
    {% book b %}
{% endfor %}