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configuration.rst

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Configuration

Mezzanine provides a central system for defining settings within your project and applications that can then be edited by admin users. The package mezzanine.conf contains the models for storing editable settings in the database as well as the functions for registering and loading these settings throughout your project.

Registering Settings

Settings are defined by creating a module named defaults.py inside one or more of the applications defined in your project's settings.INSTALLED_APPS setting. Inside your defaults.py module you then call the function mezzanine.conf.register_setting for each setting you want to define which takes several keyword arguments:

  • name: The name of the setting.
  • label: The verbose name of the setting for the admin.
  • description: The description of the setting.
  • editable: If True, the setting will be editable via the admin.
  • default: The default value of the setting.
  • choices: A list of choices the user can select from when the setting is editable.
  • append: If registering an existing setting, the default value given will be appended to the current.
  • translatable: If django-modeltranslation is activated, this setting will store and display values on a per-language basis.

Note

For settings registered with editable as True, currently only strings, integers/floats and boolean values are supported for the default value.

For example suppose we had a authors application and we wanted to create a setting that controls the number of books displayed per author page, we would define the following in authors.defaults:

from mezzanine.conf import register_setting

register_setting(
    name="AUTHORS_BOOKS_PER_PAGE",
    label="Authors books per page",
    description="The number of books to show per author page.",
    editable=True,
    default=10,
)

Note

If you are using Django 1.7 or greater and your app is included in your INSTALLED_APPS as an AppConfig (eg authors.apps.MyCrazyConfig), Mezzanine won't import your defaults.py automatically. Instead you must import it manually in your AppConfig's ready() method.

Reading Settings

Mezzanine provides a settings object via mezzanine.conf.settings in a similar way to Django's django.conf.settings. This settings object contains each of the settings registered above using their names as attributes. Continuing on from our previous example, suppose we have a view for photos:

from django.shortcuts import render
from mezzanine.conf import settings
from .models import Book

def books_view(request):
    books = Book.objects.all()[:settings.AUTHORS_BOOKS_PER_PAGE]
    return render(request, "books.html", {"books": books})

When defining editable settings, care should be taken when considering where in your project the setting will be used. For example if a setting is used in a urlpattern or the creation of a model class it would only be read when your site is first loaded, and therefore having it change at a later point by an admin user would not have any effect without reloading your entire project. In the snippet above, since the settings is being read within a view, the value of the setting being accessed is loaded each time the view is run. This ensures that if the value of the setting has been changed by an admin user it will be reflected on the website.

Note

It's also important to realize that with any settings flagged as editable, defining a value for these in your project's settings.py will only serve to provide their default values. Once editable settings are modified via the admin, their values stored in the database will always be used.

Django Settings

Mezzanine's settings object integrates with Django's settings object in a couple of ways.

Firstly it's possible to override the default value for any setting defined using mezzanine.conf.register_setting by adding its name and value as a regular setting to your project's settings module. This is especially useful when any of your project's INSTALLED_APPS (including Mezzanine itself) register settings that aren't editable and you want to override these settings without modifying the application that registered them.

Secondly it's possible to access any of the settings defined by Django or your project's settings module via Mezzanine's settings object in the same way you would use Django's settings object. This allows for a single access point for all settings regardless of how they are defined.

Default Settings

Mezzanine defines the following settings: