[Answer]-Adding an if statement to django-cms template tag

Not to be rude, but your approach is way, way off 🙂

Placeholders hold Content Plugins. Content Plugins are responsible for how they render their contents.

My advice would be to create or find a carousel content type plugin. This plugin will hold multiple images or “CarouselImage” model instances that you can iterate over, and also specify a template with which to render itself.

In this template resides the conditional statement you’re wanting to check for. Placeholders are just that – places held for content plugins.