thedod / django-ez-currencies

Display amounts in foreign currencies, based on [cached] Yahoo! Finance rates

Django currencies lets you convert prices to foreign currencies for display purposes.

• The assumption is that all prices are kept in a single currency (called the base currency).

• The user can select to display these prices in one of the foreign currencies you offer. Their rates will be fetched from Yahoo! Finance (and cached).

• You can use the to_currency template filter to display a price in a currency (base or foreign).

• You can use the currency_form and currency_mini_form template filters in order to render a currency selection form for the user.

Installation

• Copy currencies/ to your project's folders
• Add 'currencies' to your INSTALLED_APPS at settings.py
• Do ./manage.py syncdb
• Optional: do ./manage.py loaddata currencies defaults to load sample initial data

Admin

You need to have a single Base currency (if you have more than one, only the first one will be used):

• Enter ISO code (e.g. 'USD'), name (e.g. 'US Dollar'), and symbol (e.g. '$')
• Decide how long (in minutes) before cached rates expire.
• Define foreign currencies. For each:
  • ISO code, name, and symbol
  • Whether to invert the rate (if rate<1, inverting it should bring a more accurate rate).

Template filters

• You need to {% load currency_filters %}
• You can convert a price with {{ 23.23|to_currency:'EUR' }}. This would also prefix the currency's symbol (so it also makes sense to use this for the base currency).
• You can render a currency selection form with {% with f='GBP'|currency_form %}{{ f.as_p }}{% endwith %} this will render a select tag of all foreign currencies, with GBP as the selected option.
• {% with f=user.profile.currency|currency_mini_form %}{{ f.as_li }}{% endwith %} does something similar, but option text is only the currency symbol (e.g. $ instead of US Dollar ($)).

Note

You should inform the user that prices in foreign currencies are only estimates, and the payment processor (e.g. paypal) might use a different rate for the exchange.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Alexander Teves for the Yahoo! Finance interface