I have a django project utilizing flatpages for pages with primarily static content and .po-files for shorter strings, headers, buttons etc. But I'm having trouble exploring alternatives for the block of content that a customer would want to edit themselves through the admin or a customized form that I can include in templates?
I have thought about taking a CMS approach based on existing framework but because the project works great without cms-functionality for maybe 90 % of the content I do not wanna go this way, for now.
My first idea is to create a own model 'text_blocks' and use something like django-modeltranslation and populate the views context with the correct objects.
My question is first if the approach above seems reasonable but primarily what alternatives for managing this type of content am I missing.
After running my custom solution with my own app and django-modeltranslation for a while I stumbled on django-page-cms which seems to make it even simplier for customer admin users to edit pages.
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I am learning Django and I programming a CRUD for various objects. Currently I need to generate three templates per object: one for creation, one for update and one for a list. Look at how many templates I got in the picture.
The process is becoming painful.
What I am doing wrong and how to correct it?
Thanks.
From your comment:
The problem is that If I need to make a change, for example, add a new button, I have to make it in all the templates.
That sounds wrong. Either a button belong to one type of thing and then it should only exist in that template, or it should be on every page and then it should be in the base template.
You can make one template with your basic page layout (including such buttons), and have "blocks" in them that are then filled out by each template that extends the base template.
See the Django documentation about template inheritance.
Also, I think that in most cases the "create" and "update" pages are going to be extremely similar; usually they use the same template, one with data already filled in, the other without.
You could have a base template, then a generic list template and a generic edit/create template, with templates for each type of thing extending the list and the edit templates to fill in only the relevant fields.
Also, maybe you use HTML that is close enough to what the Django forms can render themselves. Then as long as you call the edit/create form the same in each of your views (like "form"), the template can just render the form and they can all use the same template.
If you're building a big web-app then this is normal for templates to be more.
Heavy (big) web-app means = more templates + more code + more time + more features
I'm trying to choose an approach I'd like to use with some part of the upcoming web-site. The part is static content, which I would usually manage with django flatpages framework, that is built in and work great. But the thing is: web site is going to be i18n in many ways and static content is one of them.
For some static content I'm going to use standard django i18n package and .po files.
Is there a way to make flatpages work in i18n way? If no, is there a way to implement that desired approach with some django-model-i18n-tool, like django-modeltranslation?
If all answers is no, what is the best practice to work around i18n static content that should be editable from some part of site, preferably admin part?
Well, there is the package django-flatpages-i18n that even includes a multilanguage menu system. It's pretty small and light-weight but will pull some dependencies like django-mptt.
Alternatively, you could use one of the Django CMS variants like django-cms or feincms. Both of them are pretty feature-complete and thus quite heavy-weight, and both will pull a number of dependencies.
And finally, you could just use a convention that all English pages start their URL with en, and then only link to those. This is the most light-weight but also the feature-poorest solution.
I have been trying to get my head around Django over the last week or two. Its slowly starting to make some sense and I am really liking it.
My goal is to replace a fairly messy excel spreadsheet with a database and frontend for my users. This would involve pulling the data out of a table, presenting it in a web tabular format, and allowing changes to be made through text fields and drop down menus, with a simple update button that will update all changes to the DB.
My question is, will the built in Django Forms functionality be the best solution? Or would I create some sort of for loop for my objects and wrap them around html form syntax in my template? I'm just not too sure how to approach the solution.
Apologies if this seems like an simple question, I just feel like there is maybe a few ways to do it but maybe there is one perfect way.
Thanks
The fastest way not to implement you own pages and to have a tabular view of your data is to use the django's built-in admin interface. It gives you sorting, filtering and search functionality and quick to start. You just need to define your models in models.py and setup the admin pages as described in the docs.
Normally the admin page is not used as a representation to users or customers but in the case you described it seems a clean and quick choice.
Exporting the excel sheet in Django and have the them rendered as text fields , is not as easy as 2 step process.
you need to know how Django works.
First you need to export the data in mysql in database using either some language or some ready made tools.
Then you need to make a Model for that table and then you can use Django admin to edit them
A designer recently handed me designs for a site I'm building for a client. They're great designs but I'm really scratching my head as to how I'm going to implement it on the site.
The content can very easily be broken down into blocks or chunks of data where I could allocate a textarea for text input, a couple of charfields for link-buttons, etc and sequentially render them out to the page.
The problem (eg why I'm not just pulling in Django-CMS et al) is the blocks are quite unique from each other. There are perhaps 20 different models that I would build for each block type. Rather than hack around a pre-fab CMS, I'd like to build a Page model and then just have an M2M that links to an ordered list of subclasses of my abstract Block class. I hope I'm not losing you.
I don't understand how I can do this. These questions spring to mind:
Is there a simple CMS that does all of this already? Am I wasting my time trying to figure out the physics?
My Blocks subclasses will technically be different type. Do I need generics for a M2M-through class to link to them? Is so, how do I do that?
How do I render x different forms in an inline admin context? (I'd like to have the page form with a list of the Blocks underneath)
How can the user specify the type of Block in the inline control?
Edit: Or, alternatively, what about a templatetag-based CMS?
I'm thinking of something like plonking this in my template:
{% editable 'unique_id' 'content-type' %}
A further example:
{% editable 'home-intro' 'text' %}
Then I could just stick these around the templates I want to be editable, in the way I want them to be editable and when logged in the client would see "Edit text", "Edit link", "Edit image" links which simply popped up the right field.
This would make things more locked down but the layout needs to remain solid (and the client knows nothing about HTML/CSS) so it's one or other of these methods IMO.
Couldn't you implement your 'Blocks' as Django CMS Plugins? Then each page is just constructed from a number of plugins.
Each plugin has an admin form which gets the specifics for itself, and then the page template renders the plugin as you want it.
If you look at the first page of the django-cms demo:
https://www.django-cms.org/en/tour-demo/
you'll see in (1) a highlighted plugin block - in this case a formatted text block that is edited with TinyMCE or similar. You can define your own plugins and add them to pages.
last month I published an article (for review) on how tho build a basic CMS for Jinja. This's templating language does not dffer very much from Django, which I have been using before.
You can find it here. It uses template inheritance to fill the content blocks.
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/5965/review-request-jinja-cms-for-energiekantoor-nl-on-google-app-engine
Or type in Google : Jinja CMS
Has anyone implemented their own AdminSite? How easy/hard was the basic implementation?
I'm in the midst of building a "cms" that's going to be quite large and decently complex in some areas and I'm wondering if using something like AdminSite would save some time. I'd rather not have to make my own implementation for admin actions and inlines and the like (I know I can just use inline forms but that's not as simple as inlines = [Foo]).
When using a custom AdminSite, is further customization equivalent to customizing the standard Django admin?
You've read the admin site docs. It's a lengthy document, but two main hooks for adding custom functionality is through custom urls and modified standard views in your own AdminSite and ModelAdmin objects. Once you hook those in and the urls get mapped, it's just like building any other Django application, only that the templates aren't yours, so they're are a bit hard to manage and take getting used to. But it allows you to do additional gymnastics, like adding a form wizard to the admin site or splitting everything into multiple forms and rendering them in a single HTML form element in the templates, doing custom handling of GET/POST requests, etc.
I've used it in the past to create views for displaying custom reports and to create custom editing scenarios for the staff. My opinion is that you should KISS as much as possible. The admin site is all about generic views and generic presentation. Do expand, but be cautious if you override template blocks and think twice before you override something that's not wrapped in a block. Certain admin site features have certain presentation assumptions and the JS client app that's shipped with Django makes some too (that's what I've figured when working with adding dynamic inline models way back), so it'd be quite an undertaking if you'd like to roll a completely different presentation.
The answer in any case is YES! The admin site will provide you with more features for managing your model data interactively. I don't know how extensively you'd need to customize the admin, but there are CMSs, dedicated admin apps and admin integrated apps that are a real eye-opener. Django CMS, as I recalled, has been praised as the best open-source Django CMS out there and from what I can see it rolls it's own cust change/list views. Rosetta is an admin site only app that allows you to edit your translation files interactively and has an exhaustive admin interface! If you shop around on bitbucket and github you'll find many more examples, it should help you figure out best how much effort you'd need to put into it.
Both
If you are OK with it not doing exactly what you want its pretty much done for you automatically. If you need fine grain control over certain things it can be hard to customize without knowing the internals of the admin code.
the django admin is more of a one size fits all kind of ui which may not be intuitive for use in some cases ..
customizing its look is easy but extending it is some how hard. you are better off designing your own views in that case.