Using django-messages

To enable django-messages in your Django project make sure it is installed. You can check if django-messages was successfully installed by opening a python shell and running:

>>> import messages
>>>

If no error occured, you can assumed that the app was installed correctly.

Edit settings

The next step is to add messages to the INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'messages',
    ...
)

Add urls

To make django-messages available to your users you should include the bunlded url-conf in your root url-conf. One example would be to edit your main urls.py and add a line like this:

urlpatterns = patterns(''
    ...
    (r'^messages/', include('messages.urls')),
    ...
)

Templates

Django-messages provides some simple default templates which will get you started quick. The templates make the assumption that a base template with the name base.html exists which defines a block content and a block sidebar. If this is not the case, or the template don’t fit due to other concerns, it’s very easy to provide to your own templates. Please see the customization docs fore more details.

Templatetags and Context-Processors

Django-messages provides a Templatetag and a Template Context Processor to make it easy to print the number of unread messages of a user in the templates.

To use the Templatetag simply add this to your template:

{% load inbox %}

Now you can either print the number of unread messages in the users inbox by using:

{% inbox_count %}

Or you can assign the count to a variable to further process it in the template:

{% inbox_count as my_var %}
{{ my_var }}

If you want to show the inbox count on every page of your site you could also use the bundled Context Processor to add the value to every Template Context instead of loading the Templatetag. Simply add the Context Processor to the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS settings in your settings.py:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    ...
    'messages.context_processors.inbox',
)

And now every Template Context will contain a variable named messages_inbox_count, if the user is logged in:

{{ messages_inbox_count }}