Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project attempts to adhere to Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

Changed

  • The django_simple_nav template tag now accepts template_name as a keyword argument (e.g. template_name="footer_nav.html"). Positional usage is still supported.

0.15.0

Added

  • Nav can now be constructed directly with template_name and items keyword arguments, without needing to subclass it.

  • The django_simple_nav template tag and Jinja2 extension now accept factory functions. A factory receives the current request and returns a Nav, making it easy to build request-aware navs (e.g. based on user authentication or permissions).

  • Added is_anonymous, is_active, and is_superuser as built-in user attribute permission checks, joining the existing is_authenticated and is_staff.

0.14.0

Added

  • Added append_slash option to NavItem for per-item control over trailing slash behavior.

  • NavItem and NavGroup can now render themselves via render(request), enabling {{ item }} in templates — similar to how Django forms support {{ form }}. Each item can have its own template_name for per-item rendering customization.

  • Added NavItemContext, a dict subclass returned by Nav.get_context_data(). It supports both dict-style access ({{ item.title }}) and self-rendering ({{ item }}), so existing templates work unchanged.

  • Default templates django_simple_nav/navitem.html and django_simple_nav/navgroup.html ship with the package for use with the self-rendering feature. These are minimal, semantic HTML with aria-current="page" for active links.

  • Support for Python 3.14.

  • Support for Django 6.0.

Removed

  • Dropped support for Python 3.9.

  • Removed docs, tests, and types optional dependency groups (e.g. pip install django-simple-nav[tests]). These are now internal development dependencies only.

0.13.0

Added

  • Support for the django.templates.backends.jinja2.Jinja2 template engine backend.

  • Support for Django 5.2.

Removed

  • Dropped support for Django 5.0.

New Contributors

0.12.0

Changed

  • Bumped django-twc-package template to v2024.29.

  • Switched project and dependency management over to use uv across the board (pyproject.toml, Justfile recipes, GHA workflows).

Removed

  • Dropped support for Python 3.8.

0.11.0

Fixed

  • Checking whether a NavItem or NavGroup is active now takes into account the URL scheme and domain name for both the nav item and request.

0.10.0

Added

  • Support for Python 3.13.

Changed

  • Bumped django-twc-package template to v2024.23.

  • Removed westerveltco/setup-ci-action from GitHub Actions workflows.

0.9.0

Changed

  • Updated NavItem.get_active to allow for using URLs that contain query strings.

0.8.0

Changed

  • Updated NavItem.url and NavItem.get_url to allow for using a callable. This allows NavItem.url to support django.urls.reverse or django.urls.reverse_lazy primarily, but it can be any callable as long as it returns a string.

0.7.0

Added

  • NavItem and NavGroup now both have a get_context_data that returns the context needed for template rendering.

  • NavItem and NavGroup now both have a get_url method for returning the URL for the item.

  • NavItem and NavGroup now both have a get_active method for returning whether the item is active or not, meaning it’s the URL currently being requested.

  • NavItem and NavGroup now both have a check_permissions method for checking whether the item should be rendered for a given request.

  • NavItem and NavGroup now support using a callable in the list of permissions. This callable should take an HttpRequest and return a bool indicating whether the item should be rendered for a given request.

  • The Nav class now has a get_template method that returns the template to render. This method takes an optional template_name argument, and if not provided is taken from the get_template_name method. If overridden, you can return a string as a way to embed a template directly in the Nav definition.

  • NavItem now has a get_items method. This is to aid a future refactor.

Changed

  • Internals of library have been refactored to slightly simplify it, including Nav, NavGroup, NavItem and the django_simple_nav templatetag.

  • Nav.get_items now returns a list of NavGroup or NavItem, instead of a list of RenderedNavItem.

  • Check for the existence of a user attached to the request object passed in to django_simple_nav.permissions.check_item_permissions has been moved to allow for an early return if there is no user. There are instances where the django.contrib.auth app can be installed, but no user is attached to the request object. This change will allow this function to correctly be used in those instances.

  • Now using v2024.20 of django-twc-package.

  • NavGroup is now marked as active if the request path matches it’s URL (if set) or and of its items’ URLs.

Removed

  • The extra_context attribute of NavItem and NavGroup now only renders the contents of the dictionary to the template context. Previously it did that as well as provided extra_context to the context. If this sounds confusing, that’s because it kinda is. 😅 This basically just means instead of two places to get the extra context (extra_context and the keys provided within the extra_context attribute), there is now just one (the keys provided within the extra_context attribute).

  • RenderedNavItem has been removed and it’s functionality refactored into both NavItem and NavGroup. This should not affect the public API of this library, but I thought it should be noted.

  • django_simple_nav.permissions module has been removed and it’s functionality refactored into NavItem.

  • Dropped support for Django 3.2.

Fixed

  • active boolean for a NavItem should now accurately match the request URL, taking into account any potential nesting and a project’s APPEND_SLASH setting.

  • The permissions check for NavGroup has been fixed to apply to the child items as well. Previously, it only checked the top-level permissions on the NavGroup instance itself. If the items within the NavGroup have permissions defined, they will now be checked and filtered out. If the check ends up filtering all of the items out and the NavGroup has no url set, then it will not be rendered.

0.6.0

Added

  • Added two new methods to Nav: get_items and get_template_name. These should allow for further flexibility and customization of rendering the Nav.

Changed

  • Now using v2024.16 of django-twc-package.

Fixed

  • Active nav item matching is now correctly using the url property on RenderedNavItem.

0.5.1

Added

  • Added the requisite py.typed file to the package, so that it plays nicely when type-checking in projects using django-simple-nav.

0.5.0

Added

  • An number of examples have been added to a new example directory. These examples are intended to demonstrate various ways how to use django-simple-nav in a Django project and include basic usage and usage with some popular CSS frameworks.

Changed

  • check_item_permission now takes a request argument instead of a user argument.

Fixed

  • check_item_permission now explicitly checks if django.contrib.auth is installed before attempting to check if a user has a permission. If it is not, it will return True by default and log a warning.

  • The request object is now passed to render_to_string when rendering the navigation template, so that the request object is available in the template context. This allows for nesting the django_simple_nav template tag within another django_simple_nav template tag, and having the request object available in the nested template.

0.4.0

Added

  • The Nav class now has two new methods: get_context_data and render. These methods are used to render the navigation to a template. These new methods give greater flexibility for customizing the rendering of the navigation, as they can be overridden when defining a new Nav.

    • Nav.get_context_data method takes a Django HttpRequest object and returns a dictionary of context data that can be used to render the navigation to a template.

    • Nav.render method takes a Django HttpRequest object and an optional template name and renders the navigation to a template, returning the rendered template as a string.

Removed

  • Nav.render_from_request method has been removed. This was only used within the template tag to render a Nav template from an HttpRequest object. It has been removed in favor of the new Nav.get_context_data and Nav.render methods.

0.3.0

Added

  • NavGroup and NavItem now has a new extra_context attribute. This allows for passing additional context to the template when rendering the navigation, either via the extra attribute (item.foo) or the extra_context attribute itself (item.extra_context.foo).

Changed

  • Now using v2024.13 of django-twc-package.

Fixed

  • RenderedNavItem.items property now correctly returns a list of RenderedNavItem objects, rather than a list of NavItem objects. This fixes a bug where the properties that should be available (e.g. active, url, etc.) were not available when iterating over the RenderedNavItem.items list if the item was a NavGroup object with child items.

0.2.0

Added

  • The django_simple_nav template tag can now take an instance of a Nav class, in addition to a Nav dotted path string. This should give greater flexibility for rendering a Nav, as it can now be overridden on a per-view/template basis.

Changed

0.1.0

Initial release! 🎉

Added

  • A group of navigation classes – Nav, NavGroup, and NavItem – that can be used together to build a simple navigation structure.

    • Nav is the main container for a navigation structure.

    • NavGroup is a container for a group of NavItem objects.

    • NavItem is a single navigation item.

  • A django_simple_nav template tag that renders a Nav object to a template. The template tag takes a string represented the dotted path to a Nav object and renders it to the template.

  • Navigation item urls can be either a URL string (e.g. https://example.com/about/ or /about/) or a Django URL name (e.g. about-view). When rendering out to the template, the template tag will resolve the URL name to the actual URL.

  • Navigation items also can take a list of permissions to control the visibility of the item. The permissions can be user attributes (e.g. is_staff, is_superuser, etc.) or a specific permission (e.g. auth.add_user).

  • Navigation items are marked as active if the current request path matches the item’s URL. This is can be useful for highlighting the current page in the navigation.

  • A Nav object’s template can either be set as a class attribute (template_name) or passed in as a keyword argument when rendering the template tag. This allows for easy customization of the navigation structure on a per-template or per-view basis.

  • Initial documentation.

  • Initial tests.

  • Initial CI/CD (GitHub Actions).

New Contributors