How to add an HTML class to a Django form's help_text?

Question

I have a simple form

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    ...
    fieldname = forms.CharField(help_text="Some help text")

I can then display this form with django's handy {{ form.as_ul }} if I like, now I need to stylise the help_text and I have no idea how. Django doesn't appear to wrap that string in anything that will let my CSS get to it so at the moment, I've restored to:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    ...
    fieldname = forms.CharField(help_text='<div class="helptext">Some help text</div>')

Which I know is wrong so I'm looking here for better advice.

Answer 1

I guess there is no other way, otherwise there probably wouldn't be a need for this ticket: http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/8426.

You could apply the patch that is provided there.

Answer 2

There's only that much you can customize in UI from form options. The more flexible way to approach a problem is to create your own form template then and reuse it instead of {{ form.as_something }}. Read these topics from Django documentation:

1. Customizing form templates
2. Reuseable form templates

This worked very well when I needed significantly customized form marks yet keeping it DRY.