I've been using those tricks for a while and find then awesomely useful.

First the more obvious. When styling navigation it's sometime useful to have a way to distinguish first and last elements, to eliminate a border for example.

CSS provide handy selectors expressions (:first-child and :last-child) to achieve this without pain. But were would the fun be without pain ?

To rectify the situation Microsoft decided nobody needed such selectors and didn't implement them in Internet Explorer.

So a sure way to do it in a for loop is like this;

{% for item in object_list %}
    {% if forloop.first %}<ul>{% endif %}
    <li>{% if forloop.first or forloop.last %} class="{% if forloop.first %}first{% else %}last{% endif %}"{% endif %}>
        {{ item }}
    </li>
    {% if forloop.last %}</ul>{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

*Edit: Updated code. Thanks to Aidas Bendoraitis for his more fail safe approach.

* NOTE: Both "if forloop..." should be inside the LI tag like this, where the attributes goes. My code highlight doesn't seem to like it however .. the whole line disappear when I try to put it at the right place.

That way the first and last element are easily accessible with the .first and .last classes, even in a retarded browser.

The other trick is a bit more useful.

Let's take again or nav example from above but we want to create a anchor links list. How to easily create unique and related anchor names ? Easy: slugify.

Slugify is a nice template tag that convert a string into a URL friendly string to create readable URLs.

But it's easy to use it to create anchors too;

<ul>
    {% for item in object_list %}
    <li>
<a href="#{{ item.name|slugify }}">{{ item.name }}</a>
</li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

Then when you cycle through the object link you can create the corresponding anchor as easily:

{% for item in object_list %}
<h2><a name="{{ item.name|slugify }}">{{ item.name }}</a></h2><h2>
<div>{{ item.body }}</div>
{% endfor %}

</h2>

That's it !