If you can view the files by hitting the URL directly in your browser, then I'd guess you've got your MEDIA_URL settings wrong, or there's something wrong in your template code. What URL is your HTML referencing for your CSS/JS/Images?
Make sure you're passing through your MEDIA_URL so it's available in your template's context, which you do by wrapping up the request passed to your view functions in a RequestContext, like this:
def some_view(request):
# ...
return render_to_response('my_template.html',
my_data_dictionary,
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
Provided you've got your MEDIA_URL setting correct, and you are serving your media correctly (which your question suggests you are) you should be able to access media using things like:
<img src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}relative/path/to/media.jpg" alt="Foobar" />
After edit to show template code:
From your template code, it looks like you're trying to reference files rooted at a template variable called site_media, which probably doesn't exist.
You need to put something like this in your settings.py:
MEDIA_URL = u'/site_media/'
Then change your template code to something like this:
<img src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}images/calendar.png">
and make sure you're passing MEDIA_URL to your template from your view function.
After comment asking for clarification about RequestContext:
The online Django book has some helpful (though currently lacking in some parts) documentation about RequestContext. Personally, I use the render_to decorator from django-annoying to avoid having to think about it. In place of my earlier sample view code, you can just do this:
from annoying import render_to
@render_to('my_template.html')
def some_view(request):
...
return my_data_dictionary
Essentially, you just decorate your view function, passing in the template you want rendered, and then just return a dict containing the extra context variables you want set (i.e. context variables in addition to those that are set for you by RequestContext, such as MEDIA_URL).
This approach obviously doesn't work if your view might use different templates depending on some condition, but there are simple ways around that:
def some_view(request, some_var):
...
if some_var:
return render_to_response('my_template.html',
my_data_dictionary,
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
else:
return render_to_response('my_other_template.html',
my_data_dictionary,
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
Can be rewritten as:
def some_view(request, some_var):
...
if some_var:
return _some_private_view(request, my_data_dictionary)
else:
return _some_other_private_view(request, my_data_dictionary)
@render_to('my_template.html')
def _some_private_view(request, my_data_dictionary):
return my_data_dictionary
@render_to('my_other_template.html')
def _some_private_view(request, my_data_dictionary):
return my_data_dictionary
Which seems clearer to me, at least.
