**NOTE**: Further development of this snippet will take place in the [django-form-utils](http://launchpad.net/django-form-utils) project.
This snippet provides BetterForm and BetterModelForm classes which are subclasses of django.forms.Form and django.forms.ModelForm, respectively. BetterForm and BetterModelForm allow subdivision of forms into fieldsets which are iterable from a template, and also allow definition of row_attrs which can be accessed from the template to apply attributes to the surrounding container of a specific form field.
It's frequently said that a generic form layout template is a pipe dream and in "real usage" it's necessary to manually layout forms, but in my experience the addition of fieldsets and row_attrs, plus a competent CSS designer, make it possible to create a generic template that can render useful production form markup in 95+% of cases.
Usage:
class MyForm(BetterForm):
one = forms.CharField()
two = forms.CharField()
three = forms.CharField()
class Meta:
fieldsets = (('main', {'fields': ('two',), 'legend': ''}),
('Advanced', {'fields': ('three', 'one'),
'description': 'advanced stuff'}))
row_attrs = {'one': {'style': 'display: none'}}
Then in the template:
{% if form.non_field_errors %}{{ form.non_field_errors }}{% endif %}
{% for fieldset in form.fieldsets %}
<fieldset class="fieldset_{{ fieldset.name }}">
{% if fieldset.legend %}
<legend>{{ fieldset.legend }}</legend>
{% endif %}
{% if fieldset.description %}
<p class="description">{{ fieldset.description }}</p>
{% endif %}
<ul>
{% for field in fieldset %}
{% if field.is_hidden %}
{{ field }}
{% else %}
<li{{ field.row_attrs }}>
{{ field.errors }}
{{ field.label_tag }}
{{ field }}
</li>
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
</ul>
</fieldset>
{% endfor %}