render()

So far, we've shown you how to load a template, fill a Context and return an HttpResponse object with the result of the rendered template. Next step was to optimize it to use get_template() instead of hard-coding templates and template paths. I took you through this process to ensure you understood how Django templates are loaded and rendered to your browser.

In practice, Django provides a much easier way to do this. Django's developers recognized that because this is such a common idiom, Django needed a shortcut that could do all this in one line of code. This shortcut is a function called render(), which lives in the module django.shortcuts.

Most of the time, you'll be using render() rather than loading templates and creating Context and HttpResponse objects manually-unless your employer judges your work by total lines of code written, that is.

Here's the ongoing current_datetime example rewritten to use render():

from django.shortcuts import render 
import datetime 
 &...