template does not exist django

First solution:

These settings

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(SETTINGS_PATH, 'templates'),
)
mean that Django will look at the templates from templates/ directory under your project.

Assuming your Django project is located at /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/ then with your settings django will look for the templates under /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/templates/

So in that case we want to move our templates to be structured like this:

/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/templates/template1.html
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/templates/template2.html
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/templates/template3.html
Second solution:

If that still doesn't work and assuming that you have the apps configured in settings.py like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'appname1',
    'appname2',
    'appname3',
)
By default Django will load the templates under templates/ directory under every installed apps. So with your directory structure, we want to move our templates to be like this:

/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/appname1/templates/template1.html
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/appname2/templates/template2.html
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/projectname/appname3/templates/template3.html
SETTINGS_PATH may not be defined by default. In which case, you will want to define it (in settings.py):

import os
SETTINGS_PATH = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))