Django - template context processors - breaking my app

Question

I was trying to set up a template context processor like this article mentions so that I could provide information to every template.

I wrote this function in views.py:

def items_in_cart(request):
    """Used by settings.TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS to provide an item count
    to every template"""
    cart, lines = get_users_cart_and_lines(request)
    return {'items_in_cart': lines.count()}

And then I added this line to settings.py:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = ('Store.views.items_in_cart',)

But now whenever I go to any page I get this error:

ImproperlyConfigured at /

Put 'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth' in your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS setting in order to use the admin application.

Did I do something wrong? What's going on here? I tried doing what the error said, and then it will render a page with all of my style sheets and images missing.

Answer 1

Django has a default set of TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS, which you need to manually add when adding your own. http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/settings/#template-context-processors

Depending on your Django version these are different, however if using Django 1.3 you might have something as follows

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
    "django.core.context_processors.debug",
    "django.core.context_processors.i18n",
    "django.core.context_processors.media",
    "django.core.context_processors.static",
    "django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages",
    "Store.views.items_in_cart",
)