visual_effect
remote_function
form_remote_tag
submit_to_remote
periodically_call_remote
link_to_remote
observe_form
observe_field


When porting webhelpers, first problem was to create it the way that only the small part of code has to be rewritten. There is one problem thou, Pylons is using routes as their URL mapper, while Django uses regexps as URL mappers. My problem is that webhelpers escapes all apostropes because there has to be no such characters in URL! So I have a choice- rewrite parts that are responsible for urls (call to routes) or return direct value passing Template class, which is not usggested by Django team. For now I think, that best will be latter metod but just as proof of concept.

Now, somewhere in ping template put this line:

There is <a href="/pong">ping</a>

To show something, create a view. In your views.py write pong function:

def pong(request):
    return HttpResponse(”There is pong!”)

This is basic page, but we need some AJAX powers. Download helpers.py code and put into templatetags folder.
In ping template page add following line at start of page:
{% load helpers %}
Change link to pong page to:

There is <a href="#" onclick="{% remote_function url:/pong/
update:pongbox %}; return false;">ping</a>
<div id=”pongbox”>
</div>

As you see, href now points at # and there is templatetag remote_function, which calls webhelpers remote_function function. Now reload page, and if everthing is right, you will see pong message below link, where pongbox is.

As you can see, visual effect function is very simple and now works only with two arguments- EffectName and div id , but we will fix that later.
Template Node class is the same as in Django documentation, so I will not get any deeper:


class VisualEffectNode(template.Node):
    def __init__(self, widget_code):
        print widget_code
        self.widget_code= widget_code
    def render(self, context):
        return self.widget_code  


Only thing left is to register it as templatetag, so at the bottom of file write down:
register.tag('visual_effect', do_visual_effect)


Now for the template part: I saved file as helpers.py, so I’m gonna insert
{% load helpers %}
at the top of template file.
Now when you need any effect, just call


<div id="my_old_div">
<b>sometext</b>
</div>
<a href=”#” onclick=’{% visual_effect SwitchOff my_old_div %}’>Get out of the way!</a>

This will create link, which remove div with id “my_old_div” when clicked.

But maybe we want to add some more arguments, such as duration? So, lets modify our code a little bit:

def do_visual_effect(parser, token):
    "adds various JS visual effects to chosen element"
    effect = token.split_contents()
    #  if addition opntions are ommited, add empty string
    if len(effect)==3:
        effect.append("")
    wigdet="new Effect."+effect[1]+'("'+ effect[2] +'",{'+ effect[3] + '})'
    return VisualEffectNode(wigdet)

I just appended dictionary-like structure where additional arguments can be inserted.
In template add something like this

<a href="#" onclick='{% visual_effect Highlight model2 duration:1 %}'>Highlight model1</a>

and we’re set!
That’s it for now, I try later to write something more.