django and drupal

Question

Hi, Is there way to work with drupal beautiful themes and display django content? I have site written with Django, and I now needs to build templates and some design site to display it.. How can I use drupal for this target?

Thanks..

Answer 1

Drupal's theming system is specific to Drupal: you can't separate it without rewriting a lot of functionality. You could, however, use Drupal as a front-end site and expose your Django site to Drupal as an API or even expose the database itself.

As an API, you could utilize Views 3's new Custom Backend API to read the data from Django and re-display it. There isn't any documentation yet (Views 3 hasn't hit a stable release yet), but you can check out Apache Solr Views or Extendr to get an idea of how to implement it.

You could use Drupal's Database API, but the database really needs to be the same RDBMS as Drupal. You can get around that limitation, but it's a real pain to do (although this was made easier in Drupal 7).

Answer 2

Coupling two systems in this way always leads to tears. Whatever you want to do in Django you can probably figure out how to do with Drupal modules and custom code. And whatever theme you can create in Drupal can be created for Django, too. The extra time you spend learning one or the other will pay off in fewer trainwrecks in the end.