Django: Implementing a nested, reusable component design
It is an interesting problem. Ideally you should pull all the components from database before rendering. But looking at hierarchy, making template tags makes sense. These template tag will pull appropriate data. Assume for the purpose of this problem that database query gets cached due to search locality.
I'm working on a big social networking app in Django where I expect to use certain front-end components many times, and often with functionality designed in such a way that custom components contain other custom components, which might contain yet smaller subcomponents (ad infinitum).  All of these components are typically dynamic generated.  I'm trying to figure out the best way to architect this in the Django framework, such that my components are easy to maintain and have clear programming interfaces.  Relying heavily on global context would seem to be the opposite of this, however, I can see advantages in avoiding redundant queries by doing them all at once in the view.
Custom inclusion template tags seem like a good fit for implementing components, but I'm wondering, do highly nested template tags can create performance issues, or does the parsing architecture prevent this?  What is the best way of making it self-documenting at the view level what context is needed to render the main page template, custom tags and all?  I'm imagining it to be a minor nightmare to try to properly maintain the code to set up the template context.  Lastly, what is the best way to maintain the CSS for these components?
Feel free to suggest other recommended approaches for creating a nested-component design.