It is pretty easy to integrate your own Django applications with django CMS. You have 5 ways of integrating your app:
Menus
Static extend the menu entries
AttachMenus
Attach your menu to a page.
App-Hooks
Attach whole apps with optional menu to a page.
Navigation Modifiers
Modify the whole menu tree
Custom Plugins
Display your models / content in cms pages
Create a menu.py in your application and write the following inside:
from menus.base import Menu, NavigationNode
from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
class TestMenu(Menu):
def get_nodes(self, request):
nodes = []
n = NavigationNode(_('sample root page'), "/", 1)
n2 = NavigationNode(_('sample settings page'), "/bye/", 2)
n3 = NavigationNode(_('sample account page'), "/hello/", 3)
n4 = NavigationNode(_('sample my profile page'), "/hello/world/", 4, 3)
nodes.append(n)
nodes.append(n2)
nodes.append(n3)
nodes.append(n4)
return nodes
menu_pool.register_menu(TestMenu)If you refresh a page you should now see the menu entries from above. The get_nodes function should return a list of NavigationNode <menus.base.NavigationNode> instances. A NavigationNode takes the following arguments:
title
What should the menu entry read?
url,
Link if menu entry is clicked.
id
A unique id for this menu.
parent_id=None
If this is a child of an other node give here the id of the parent.
parent_namespace=None
If the parent node is not from this menu you can give it the parent namespace. The namespace is the name of the class. In the above example that would be: "TestMenu"
- attr=None
A dictionary of additional attributes you may want to use in a modifier or in the template.
Classes that extend from menus.base.Menu always get attached to the root. But if you want the menu be attached to a CMS Page you can do that as well.
Instead of extending from ~menus.base.Menu you need to extend from cms.menu_bases.CMSAttachMenu and you need to define a name. We will do that with the example from above:
from menus.base import NavigationNode
from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from cms.menu_bases import CMSAttachMenu
class TestMenu(CMSAttachMenu):
name = _("test menu")
def get_nodes(self, request):
nodes = []
n = NavigationNode(_('sample root page'), "/", 1)
n2 = NavigationNode(_('sample settings page'), "/bye/", 2)
n3 = NavigationNode(_('sample account page'), "/hello/", 3)
n4 = NavigationNode(_('sample my profile page'), "/hello/world/", 4, 3)
nodes.append(n)
nodes.append(n2)
nodes.append(n3)
nodes.append(n4)
return nodes
menu_pool.register_menu(TestMenu)Now you can link this Menu to a page in the 'Advanced' tab of the page settings under attached menu.
Each must have a get_menu_title method, a ~django.db.models.Model.get_absolute_url method, and a childrens list with all of its children inside (the 's' at the end of childrens is done on purpose because children is already taken by django-mptt).
Be sure that get_menu_title and get_absolute_url don't trigger any queries when called in a template or you may have some serious performance and database problems with a lot of queries.
It may be wise to cache the output of ~menu.base.Menu.get_nodes. For this you may need to write a wrapper class because of dynamic content that the pickle module can't handle.
If you want to display some static pages in the navigation ("login", for example) you can write your own "dummy" class that adheres to the conventions described above.
A base class for this purpose can be found in cms/utils/navigation.py
With App-Hooks you can attach whole Django applications to pages. For example you have a news app and you want it attached to your news page.
To create an apphook create a cms_app.py in your application. And in there write the following:
from cms.app_base import CMSApp
from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
class MyApphook(CMSApp):
name = _("My Apphook")
urls = ["myapp.urls"]
apphook_pool.register(MyApphook)Replace myapp.urls with the path to your applications urls.py.
Now edit a page and open the advanced settings tab. Select your new apphook under "Application". Save the page.
Warning
If you are on a multi-threaded server (mostly all webservers, except the dev-server): Restart the server because the URLs are cached by Django and in a multi-threaded environment we don't know which caches are cleared yet.
Note
If at some point you want to remove this apphook after deleting the cms_app.py there is a cms management command called uninstall apphooks that removes the specified apphook(s) from all pages by name. eg. manage.py cmsmanage uninstall apphooks MyApphook. To find all names for uninstallable apphooks there is a command for this aswell manage.py cmsmanage list apphooks.
If you attached the app to a page with the url /hello/world/ and the app has a urls.py that looks like this:
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
urlpatterns = patterns('sampleapp.views',
url(r'^$', 'main_view', name='app_main'),
url(r'^sublevel/$', 'sample_view', name='app_sublevel'),
)The main_view should now be available at /hello/world/ and the sample_view has the url /hello/world/sublevel/.
Note
All views that are attached like this must return a ~django.template.RequestContext instance instead of the default ~django.template.Context instance.
An additional feature of apphooks is that if you use the cms.middleware.multilingual.MultilingualURLMiddleware all apphook urls are language namespaced.
What this means:
To reverse the first url from above you would use something like this in your template:
{% url app_main %}If you want to access the same url but in a different language use a langauge namespace:
{% url de:app_main %}
{% url en:app_main %}
{% url fr:app_main %}If you want to add a menu to that page as well that may represent some views in your app add it to your apphook like this:
from myapp.menu import MyAppMenu
class MyApphook(CMSApp):
name = _("My Apphook")
urls = ["myapp.urls"]
menus = [MyAppMenu]
apphook_pool.register(MyApphook)For an example if your app has a Category model and you want this category model to be displayed in the menu when you attach the app to a page. We assume the following model:
from django.db import models
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
import mptt
class Category(models.Model):
parent = models.ForeignKey('self', blank=True, null=True)
name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
def __unicode__(self):
return self.name
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse('category_view', args=[self.pk])
try:
mptt.register(Category)
except mptt.AlreadyRegistered:
passWe would now create a menu out of these categories:
from menus.base import NavigationNode
from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from cms.menu_bases import CMSAttachMenu
from myapp.models import Category
class CategoryMenu(CMSAttachMenu):
name = _("test menu")
def get_nodes(self, request):
nodes = []
for category in Category.objects.all().order_by("tree_id", "lft"):
nodes.append(NavigationNode(category.name, category.pk, category.parent_id))
return nodes
menu_pool.register_menu(CategoryMenu)If you add this menu now to your app-hook:
from myapp.menus import CategoryMenu
class MyApphook(CMSApp):
name = _("My Apphook")
urls = ["myapp.urls"]
menus = [MyAppMenu, CategoryMenu]You get the static entries of MyAppMenu and the dynamic entries of CategoryMenu both attached to the same page.
Navigation Modifiers give your application access to navigation menus.
A modifier can add nodes to a menu, change the properties of existing nodes, and even rearrange entire menus.
A simple example: you have a news application that publishes pages independently of django CMS. However, you would like to integrate the application into the menu structure of your site, so that at appropriate places a News node appears in the navigation menu.
In such a case, a Navigation Modifier is the solution.
Normally, you'd want to place modifiers in your application's menu.py.
To make your modifier available, it then needs to be registered with menus.menu_pool.menu_pool.
Now, when a page is loaded and the menu generated, your modifier will be able to inspect and modify its nodes.
A simple modifier looks something like this:
from menus.base import Modifier
from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
class MyMode(Modifier):
"""
"""
def modify(self, request, nodes, namespace, root_id, post_cut, breadcrumb):
if post_cut:
return nodes
count = 0
for node in nodes:
node.counter = count
count += 1
return nodes
menu_pool.register_modifier(MyMode)It has a method ~menus.base.Modifier.modify that should return a list of ~menus.base.NavigationNode instances. ~menus.base.Modifier.modify should take the following arguments:
request
A Django request instance. Maybe you want to modify based on sessions, or user or permissions?
nodes
All the nodes. Normally you want to return them again.
namespace
A Menu Namespace. Only given if somebody requested a menu with only nodes from this namespace.
root_id
Was a menu request based on an ID?
post_cut
Every modifier is called two times. First on the whole tree. After that the tree gets cut. To only show the nodes that are shown in the current menu. After the cut the modifiers are called again with the final tree. If this is the case
post_cutisTrue.breadcrumb
Is this not a menu call but a breadcrumb call?
Here is an example of a built-in modifier that marks all node levels:
class Level(Modifier):
"""
marks all node levels
"""
post_cut = True
def modify(self, request, nodes, namespace, root_id, post_cut, breadcrumb):
if breadcrumb:
return nodes
for node in nodes:
if not node.parent:
if post_cut:
node.menu_level = 0
else:
node.level = 0
self.mark_levels(node, post_cut)
return nodes
def mark_levels(self, node, post_cut):
for child in node.children:
if post_cut:
child.menu_level = node.menu_level + 1
else:
child.level = node.level + 1
self.mark_levels(child, post_cut)
menu_pool.register_modifier(Level)If you want to display content of your apps on other pages custom plugins are a great way to accomplish that. For example, if you have a news app and you want to display the top 10 news entries on your homepage, a custom plugin is the way to go.
For a detailed explanation on how to write custom plugins please head over to the custom_plugins section.