[Answered ]-Embed an optional Django application in another page, if that app is present

Although I don’t see a problem with your approach, but I think a generic template tag would provide the most flexibilty, especially if you want to extend this ability to other applications that you might install later.

Your base template loads a generic “boxes” tag. In the tag’s source, you can then render whatever you want based on the installed apps for that particular instance. So you can have a set of default apps to render boxes for, or the end user can customize which apps should have boxes rendered.

In your settings, configuration or even in the tag itself, you can identify the template to render for the block per app.

Assuming that each app has its templates in app/templates directory – this psuedo should get you going (this is untested):

from django.conf import settings
from django import template
register = template.Library()

class GenericBox(template.Node):
   def __init__(self, app):
      self.app = app
   def render(self, context):
      if self.app not in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
         return '' # if the app is not installed
      # Here you would probably do a lookup against
      # django.settings or some other lookup to find out which
      # template to load based on the app.
      t = template.loader.get_template('some_template.html') # (or load from var)
      c = template.RequestContext(context,{'var':'value'}) # optional
      return t.render(c)    

@register.tag(name='custom_box', takes_context=True, context_class=RequestContext)
def box(parser, token):
    parts = token.split_contents()
    if len(parts) != 2:
        parts[1] = 'default_app' # is the default app that will be rendered.
    return GenericBox(parts[1])