FeinCMS is primarily a system to work with lists of content blocks which you can assign to arbitrary other objects. You do not necessarily have to use it with a hierarchical page structure, but that’s the most common use case of course. Being able to put content together in small manageable pieces is interesting for other uses too, i.e. for weblog entries where you have rich text content interspersed with images, videos or maybe even galleries.
To activate the page module, you need to follow the instructions in Installation instructions and afterwards add feincms.module.page to your INSTALLED_APPS.
Before proceeding with manage.py syncdb, it might be a good idea to take a look at Page extension modules – the page module does have the minimum of features in the default configuration and you will probably want to enable several extensions.
You need to create some content models too. No models are created by default, because there is no possibility to unregister models. A sane default might be to create ImageContent and RichTextContent models; you can do this by adding the following lines somewhere into your project, for example in a models.py file that will be processed anyway:
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from feincms.module.page.models import Page
from feincms.content.richtext.models import RichTextContent
from feincms.content.image.models import ImageContent
Page.register_extensions('datepublisher', 'translations') # Example set of extensions
Page.register_templates({
'title': _('Standard template'),
'path': 'base.html',
'regions': (
('main', _('Main content area')),
('sidebar', _('Sidebar'), 'inherited'),
),
})
Page.create_content_type(RichTextContent)
Page.create_content_type(ImageContent, POSITION_CHOICES=(
('block', _('block')),
('left', _('left')),
('right', _('right')),
))
It will be a good idea most of the time to register the RichTextContent first, because it’s the most used content type for many applications. The content type dropdown will contain content types in the same order as they were registered.
Please note that you should put these statements into a models.py file which is executed at Django startup time, i.e. into a models.py file contained in INSTALLED_APPS.
The customized admin interface code is contained inside the ModelAdmin subclass, so you do not need to do anything special here. You only need to set FEINCMS_ADMIN_MEDIA as described in the installation documentation.
If you use the RichTextContent, you need to download TinyMCE and configure FeinCMS’ richtext support:
FEINCMS_RICHTEXT_INIT_CONTEXT = {
'TINYMCE_JS_URL': '/your_custom_path/tiny_mce.js',
}
Just add the following lines to your urls.py to get a catch-all URL pattern:
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'', include('feincms.urls')),
)
If you want to define a page as home page for the whole site, you can give it an override_url value of '/'.
More information can be found in Integrating 3rd party apps into your site
Imagine you’ve got a third-party gallery application and you’d like to include excerpts of galleries inside your content. You’d need to write a GalleryContent base class and let FeinCMS create a model class for you with some important attributes added.
from django.db import models
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from feincms.module.page.models import Page
from gallery.models import Gallery
class GalleryContent(models.Model):
gallery = models.ForeignKey(Gallery)
class Meta:
abstract = True
def render(self, **kwargs):
return render_to_string('gallery/gallerycontent.html', {
'images': self.gallery.image_set.order_by('?')[:5],
})
Page.create_content_type(GalleryContent)
The newly created GalleryContent for Page will live in the database table page_page_gallerycontent.
Note
FeinCMS requires your content type model to be abstract.
More information about content types is available in Content types - what your page content is built of.
Extensions are a way to put often-used functionality easily accessible without cluttering up the core page model for those who do not need them. The extensions are standard python modules with a register() method which will be called upon registering the extension. The register() method receives the Page class itself and the model admin class PageAdmin as arguments. The extensions can be activated as follows:
Page.register_extensions('navigation', 'titles', 'translations')
The following extensions are available currently:
changedate — Creation and modification dates
Adds automatically maintained creation and modification date fields to the page.
datepublisher — Date-based publishing
Adds publication date and end date fields to the page, thereby enabling the administrator to define a date range where a page will be available to website visitors.
navigation — Navigation extensions
Adds navigation extensions to the page model. You can define subclasses of NavigationExtension, which provide submenus to the navigation generation mechanism. See Letting 3rd party apps define navigation entries for more information on how to use this extension.
seo — Search engine optimization
Adds fields to the page relevant for search engine optimization (SEO), currently only meta keywords and description.
symlinks — Symlinked content extension
Sometimes you want to reuse all content from a page in another place. This extension lets you do that.
titles — Additional titles
Adds additional title fields to the page model. You may not only define a single title for the page to be used in the navigation, the <title> tag and inside the content area, you are not only allowed to define different titles for the three uses but also enabld to define titles and subtitles for the content area.
translations — Page translations
Adds a language field and a recursive translations many to many field to the page, so that you can define the language the page is in and assign translations. I am currently very unhappy with state of things concerning the definition of translations, so that extension might change somewhat too. This extension also adds new instructions to the setup_request method where the Django i18n tools are initialized with the language given on the page object.
Note
These extension modules add new fields to the Page class. If you add or remove page extensions after you’ve run syncdb for the first time you have to change the database schema yourself, or use Database migration support for FeinCMS with South.
A request processor is a function that gets the currently selected page and the request as parameters and returns either None (or nothing) or a HttpResponse. All registered request processors are run before the page is actually rendered. If the request processor indeed returns a HttpResponse, further rendering of the page is cut short and this response is returned immediately to the client.
This allows for various actions dependent on page and request, for example a simple user access check can be implemented like this:
def authenticated_request_processor(page, request):
if not request.user.is_authenticated():
return HttpResponseForbidden()
Page.register_request_processors(authenticated_request_processor)
Analogous to a request processor, a reponse processor runs after a page has been rendered. It needs to accept the page, the request and the response as parameters and may change the response (or throw an exception, but try not to).
A reponse processor is the right place to tweak the returned http response for whatever purposes you have in mind.
def set_random_header_response_processor(page, request, response):
response['X-Random-Number'] = 42
Page.register_response_processors(set_random_header_response_processor)
An ETag is a string that is associated with a page – it should change if (and only if) the page content itself has changed. Since a page’s content may depend on more than just the raw page data in the database (e.g. it might list its children or a navigation tree or an excerpt from some other place in the CMS alltogether), you are required to write an etag producing method for the page.
# Very stupid etag function, a page is supposed the unchanged as long
# as its id and slug do not change. You definitely want something more
# involved, like including last change dates or whatever.
def my_etag(page, request):
return 'PAGE-%d-%s' % ( page.id, page.slug )
Page.etag = my_etag
Page.register_request_processors(Page.etag_request_processor)
Page.register_response_processors(Page.etag_response_processor)
To create a sitemap that is automatically populated with all pages in your Feincms site, add the following to your top-level urls.py:
from feincms.module.page.sitemap import PageSitemap
sitemaps = {'pages' : PageSitemap}
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^sitemap\.xml$', 'django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap',
{'sitemaps': sitemaps}),
)
This will produce a default sitemap at the /sitemap.xml url. A sitemap can be further customised by passing it appropriate parameters, like so:
sitemaps = {'pages': PageSitemap(max_depth=2)}
The following parameters can be used to modify the behaviour of the sitemap: