Django form fields and templates

I've been working with Django for the last little while (or long while) and something that stumped me for a while was a useful, generic approach to marking-up forms in HTML. In particular, making it possible to use CSS to style classes of fields (all checkboxes, for instance, or all date-pickers) effectively. Doing so requires being able to write a selector to pick such elements out, but I found it very difficult to do so.

The only way, as far as I (and the replies on django-users@), is to write a template filter to extract a such a value for you. Thankfully, this it pretty easy:

    @register.filter
    def field_type(field):
        """
        Get the name of the field class.
        """
        if hasattr(field, 'field'):
            field = field.field
        s = str(type(field.widget).__name__)
        s = s.rpartition('Input')[0]
        s = s.lower()
        return s

I can use the above filter to add a class to my form markup:

            <div class="form-field form-">
                
                
                
            </div>

Which I can then use in my CSS to style particular widgets without having to do them one-by-one using ID's:

.form-field label {
    display: block;
    width: 15%;
    float: left;
}

div.form-checkbox label {
    width: 85%;
    float: right;
    clear: right;
}
div.form-checkbox input {
    float: left;
    margin-left: 12%;
}