Jinja 1.0 Release Announcement

Jinja 1.0 is out now. Jinja is a sandboxed template engine written in pure Python licensed under the BSD license. It provides a Django-like non-XML syntax and compiles templates into executable python code. It's basically a combination of Django templates and python code.

Differences to Django

While the Jinja default syntax looks pretty much like Django the rest of the template engine works completely different. Jinja was designed to be used without Django and to support Python expressions.

Features that Jinja has in common with Django

• filter functions
• block based template inheritance
• the {% cycle %} and {% filter %} tag
• being sandboxed
• similar default syntax

Differences to Django

• advanced lexer that allows escaping of tags
• generation of bytecode for faster template execution
• definition of macros (often recurring tasks like rendering dialog boxes, form elements etc.)
• raw blocks
• uncoupled internationalization support
• expression support in any tag
• abbility of modifying the context from the template by using the {% set %} tag.
• support for function calling with arguments
• filters can be called with a variable argument count
• full unicode support
• deferred objects (objects that are resolved on first access, not on context instanciation)
• Missing support for {{ block.super }}
• Support for recursing by using recursing for loops or self calling macros.
• If blocks have support for multiple elif statements
• for loops have an optional else block executed if there was no iteration.
• test functions like is even etc.
• block delimiters are exchangeable.
• no implicit function calling
• {% endblock %} doesn't support the optional name argument
• {% ifchanged %} is not implemented because of performance reasons. If there's enough interest an implementation might be added
• {% templatetag %} is not implemented because Jinja supports escaping via {% raw %} or the variable syntax
• {% comment %} is not implemented, rather use {# ... #} for commenting out stuff.
• {% now %} is not implemented because Jinja doesn't handle l10n. Datetime specific stuff should be provided by the application.
• {% load %}, loading components for Jinja works from the application side. Template designers don't have to import stuff on their own.
• {% debug %} is not implemented. You can use the global function debug().
• custom tags are not supported. Most of the stuff that is possible with django template tags is possible with either functions, filters, tests or a combination of them.
• using keywords like endfor as identifer raises an exception.