What's the meaning of “vanilla” object list

Question

In the documentation of Django, I have a confusion about this passage below:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/class-based-views/generic-display/

Notice that along with a filtered queryset, we’re also using a custom template name. If we didn’t, the generic view would use the same template as the “vanilla” object list, which might not be what we want.

I'm not a native English speaker,so can anybody tell me what the “vanilla” object list is. Thank you very much!

I also want to know what the "ordinary" object list, described as “vanilla” in the Django documentation, is exactly.

Answer 1

vanilla - Unexciting, normal, conventional, boring. (source)

In your case it means "default" queryset value for generic view which will be

queryset = Book.objects.all()

If you don't specify it explicitly

Read more about "default" queryset value here https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/class-based-views/generic-display/#viewing-subsets-of-objects

Especially this part

Specifying model = Publisher is really just shorthand for saying queryset = Publisher.objects.all()

Answer 2

In this context, "vanilla" means "conventional". In other words, if the template_name class attribute was not customized, the AcmeBookList generic view would use the same template as the BookList generic view.