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Best Django practise - when to use views and when to use tags

I'm in the process of delving into Django into a little more depth - and I now have certain blocks around my website which are recycled, but not necessarily suited to a being placed in base.html and then sprinkled with {% extends /root/to/base.html %}.
So, I have a bespoke widget I have created which is utilised on certain pages but in different configurations, is it best to register and inclusion tag and reference the template you want to accompany those stored variables and arrays/lists/dictionaries etc..
For me it seems easier to define tags and then dot these around where I need them and just make edits to the template that is registered with that tag method? But is this the accepted Django standard?

In Django
a "view" is a callable that is responsible for handling a request and returning a response,
a template tag is a piece of code that will be executed in the context of rendering a template and will either push something in the template's context or render some text or markup.
Oranges and apples, really, and it should be quite clear when you want a view and when you want a template tag.
And yes, using inclusion tags (or a full-blown custom tag using a template to render some data) is "an accepted Django standard" - actually that's exactly what template tags are for.

Django CMS simple placeholders outside of cms

I have a fully developed Django app and decided to add DjangoCMS to give a content developers a quick way to prototype landing pages etc. It now lives under myurl.com/cms and works quite well. The guys can create new pages, choose a template and add plugins there.
When i saw the placeholder template tag I immediately thought about placing it all over the project, outside the cms, everywhere I want the product team to be able to quickly add and change content. I don't want them to create a new page for this from the cms because maybe the site has complex functionality which is only used once in this context (i.e. the search page).
So basically I expect to have static placeholders that I can place in the html part of the page using the cms plugins template tags.
I already found Placeholders outside the CMS in the DjangoCMS docs.
But for this to work I have to grab the related placeholder object for every view that renders a page, which would increase the amount of work to "quickly add a placeholder for this text" considerably.
Is there an easy way to do this? I kind of expect to not be the first to have that issue.

There's three types of placeholders:
Page placeholders - Declared using {% placeholder %}. These can only be used inside a cms page.
Static placeholders - Declared using {% static_placeholder %}. Not bound to pages or objects.
App placeholder - Declared in your models.py using PlaceholderField and rendered in template using {% render_placeholder %}
The rule of thumb is, if you're rendering a cms page, use a page placeholder, otherwise depending on your use-case use a static placeholder.

Advice about composing several django templates

I'm developing a web application with Django and we have met a dilemma about the design.
We were making one template for every screen, but right now we have detected that some parts of of the screen with the information are repeated all over the different screens. For example, when coming to show personal data of a person, you can show also another data concerning that person, but not personal data (financial data, for instance).
My intuition told me that we should look for a solution in which we could make small templates that we could compose, combine and concatenate and that we should also make different views or functions which would return its own associated template each one.
Thus, person_data() would return the rendered template showing the name, surname, address, etc... and financial_data() would return the rendered template showing the salary, bank account, etc... After that, the desirable thing would be concatenating both or inserting them in a wider template for showing all this together.
<html>
...
{# Html code here #}
...
{# person_data template #}
...
...
{# financial_data template #}
...
{# Html code here #}
...
</html>
So as always I made some research on the net and I found:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/#include
a link which describes how to use include for inserting a template file in another template:
{% include "foo/bar.html" %}
And you can also use a variable from the python function with the path name or an object with render method:
{% include template_name %}
So we could use all this in this way for combining, concatenating, composing and operating on templates. We could choose the one which includes the others and passing it the context for all templates (I suppose, I didn't test anything). But I don't know if I'm well directed or if this is the best way to go. I would appreciate some advice.
I also found another interesting thread in stackoverflow talking about this:
How do you insert a template into another template?
My idea is to have small templates which are used repeatedly in different spots of the web and composing them in Unix-like style, so I would have small visual pieces that would be used once and again saving a lot of hours of writing of code.
Please some advice.
Thanks in advance

Yes, that is a correct approach. I think the best solution is to combine {% include %} and {% extend %}, which will allow you to inherit from a base template (via extend), and include parts you want from other templates (via include).
You'd end up having a base template, a template for the header, the footer, parts of the body etc.
You might also want to read more about it here and here

Building a generic block-based CMS with Django

A designer recently handed me designs for a site I'm building for a client. They're great designs but I'm really scratching my head as to how I'm going to implement it on the site.
The content can very easily be broken down into blocks or chunks of data where I could allocate a textarea for text input, a couple of charfields for link-buttons, etc and sequentially render them out to the page.
The problem (eg why I'm not just pulling in Django-CMS et al) is the blocks are quite unique from each other. There are perhaps 20 different models that I would build for each block type. Rather than hack around a pre-fab CMS, I'd like to build a Page model and then just have an M2M that links to an ordered list of subclasses of my abstract Block class. I hope I'm not losing you.
I don't understand how I can do this. These questions spring to mind:
Is there a simple CMS that does all of this already? Am I wasting my time trying to figure out the physics?
My Blocks subclasses will technically be different type. Do I need generics for a M2M-through class to link to them? Is so, how do I do that?
How do I render x different forms in an inline admin context? (I'd like to have the page form with a list of the Blocks underneath)
How can the user specify the type of Block in the inline control?
Edit: Or, alternatively, what about a templatetag-based CMS?
I'm thinking of something like plonking this in my template:
{% editable 'unique_id' 'content-type' %}
A further example:
{% editable 'home-intro' 'text' %}
Then I could just stick these around the templates I want to be editable, in the way I want them to be editable and when logged in the client would see "Edit text", "Edit link", "Edit image" links which simply popped up the right field.
This would make things more locked down but the layout needs to remain solid (and the client knows nothing about HTML/CSS) so it's one or other of these methods IMO.

Couldn't you implement your 'Blocks' as Django CMS Plugins? Then each page is just constructed from a number of plugins.
Each plugin has an admin form which gets the specifics for itself, and then the page template renders the plugin as you want it.
If you look at the first page of the django-cms demo:
https://www.django-cms.org/en/tour-demo/
you'll see in (1) a highlighted plugin block - in this case a formatted text block that is edited with TinyMCE or similar. You can define your own plugins and add them to pages.

last month I published an article (for review) on how tho build a basic CMS for Jinja. This's templating language does not dffer very much from Django, which I have been using before.
You can find it here. It uses template inheritance to fill the content blocks.
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/5965/review-request-jinja-cms-for-energiekantoor-nl-on-google-app-engine
Or type in Google : Jinja CMS

How to prevent Satchmo forms from displaying asterisk after required fields?

I'm customizing my Satchmo store forms and have an icon that appears before any required fields. The problem is, Satchmo seems to want to render a text asterisk after the required fields. I'm using field.label to get this label, should I be using something else?
EDIT: All my form templates are hard coded. I have an inclusion tag that takes a field and wraps it in a standard field template I've developed. My template uses the {{ field.label }} to display the friendly name of the field. It seem the label itself has a single asterisk in it at the end.

What happens if you do the following?
Copy some or all of Satchmo's form templates to a new location and modify them to remove the asterisks
Arrange it so that your copies of those templates are seen before Satchmo's copies (by configuring the template loader settings appropriately, say by placing the app with the copied templates above Satchmo in settings.INSTALLED_APPS)
Update: I'm not able to reproduce your results with a vanilla Satchmo 0.8.1 installation. Can you give some more information? Here's what I did: First, I modified templates/contact/update_form.html, which contains hard-coded asterisks. I could easily remove them by changing the template; they disappeared from the UI. Instead, I left them in but added immediately after, in parentheses, {{ form.field.label }} after each of the fields in a section of the form. This is the result:
The labels here do contain an asterisk - as I mentioned earlier, this is because ContactInfoForm hardcodes this behaviour in its __init__ method. You would have to undo this behaviour, perhaps by using a derived class which removes trailing *s from field labels.
However, I did not find any *s appearing in other required fields. For example, here's a screenshot of the checkout form when I tried submitting without entering required information:
As you can see the credit card number and CCV are required fields but do not appear with an asterisk at the prompt. Nor do the labels have asterisks. So, the problem you are experiencing appears to be something to do with your customisations, but without more information it is difficult to be more helpful.