Model name of objects in django templates

Django added a publicly accessible API to model options called _meta, but you still can't access variables with an underscore in the template. Use a template filter:

@register.filter
def verbose_name(instance):
    return instance._meta.verbose_name

In the template:

{{ instance|verbose_name }}

I even like to chain the title filter to capitalize the words in the my template:

{{ instance|verbose_name|title }}

You can very easily access the content type of the page, this way you don't even need to poke into the specific:

{% if pub.content_type.app_labeled_name == 'home | publication' %}
    {% include "home/publication.html" with pub=pub.specific %}
{% endif %}

This answer demonstrates a practical use case. In my app each model has a generic.CreateView named name=”<model>-create” in urls.py; namespaced/referenced as {% url <app>:<model>-create %} in those templates which need to link to it. Each model has a generic.ListView rendered by <app>/templates/<app>/<model>_list.html. I wanted to include a button at the bottom of each rendered list view to link to the corresponding create view. To ensure consistency across multiple list views I wanted to do this in a base template which each list view template could extend upon. To do this I needed to be able to reference the model name in a template. Here’s how I did it.

$ mkdir <app>/templatetags
$ touch <app>/templatetags/__init__.py
$ vi <app>/templatetags/tags.py

from django import template
register = template.Library()
# this filter allows any template to reference an instance’s model name as <instance>|class_name
@register.filter(name="class_name")
def class_name(instance):
    return instance._meta.model.__name__

$ vi <app>/templates/base_list.html

~
{% with name=object_list|first|class_name|lower %}
        <button onclick="location.href='{% url request.resolver_match.app_name|add:':'|add:name|add:'-create' %}';" title="create"><i class="fa fa-plus"></i></button>
{% endwith  %}

* substitute <app>, <model>, and <instance> for your own names.