You will learn how to add your own content types and how you can render them in a template.
In FeinCMS, a content type is something to attach as content to a base model, for example a CMS Page (the base model) may have several rich text components associated to it (those would be RichTextContent content types).
Every content type knows, amongst other things, how to render itself. Think of content types as “snippets” of information to appear on a page.
Simple:
<div id="content">
{% block content %}
{% for content in feincms_page.content.main %}
{{ content.render }}
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
{% block sidebar %}
{% for content in feincms_page.content.sidebar %}
{{ content.render }}
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}
</div>
FeinCMS offers a method on feincms.models.Base called create_content_type() which will create concrete content types from your abstract content types. Since content types can be used for different CMS base models such as pages and blog entries (implementing a rich text or an image content once and using it for both models makes lots of sense) your implementation needs to be abstract. create_content_type() adds a few utility methods and a few model fields to build the concrete type, a foreign key to the base model (f.e. the Page) and several properties indicating where the content block will be positioned in the rendered result.
Note
The examples on this page assume that you use the Page CMS base model. The principles outlined apply for all other CMS base types.
Without further ado, here’s the first example:
from feincms.module.page.models import Page
from django.contrib.markup.templatetags.markup import textile
from django.db import models
class TextilePageContent(models.Model):
content = models.TextField()
class Meta:
abstract = True
def render(self, **kwargs):
return textile(self.content)
Page.create_content_type(TextilePageContent)
There are three field names you should not use because they are added by create_content_type: These are parent, region and ordering. These fields are used to specify the place where the content will be placed in the output.
The default render method uses the region key to find a render method in your concrete content type and calls it. This allows you to customize the output depending on the region; you might want to show the same content differently in a sidebar and in the main region for example. If no matching method has been found a NotImplementedError is raised.
This render method tries to be a sane default, nothing more. You can simply override it and put your own code there if you do not any differentiation, or if you want to do it differently.
All render methods should accept **kwargs. Some render methods might need the request, for example to determine the correct Google Maps API key depending on the current domain without resorting to ugly hacks.
The example above could be rewritten like this:
{% load feincms_tags %}
<div id="content">
{% block content %}
{% for content in feincms_page.content.main %}
{% feincms_render_content content request %}
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
{% block sidebar %}
{% for content in feincms_page.content.sidebar %}
{% feincms_render_content content request %}
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}
</div>
Or even like this:
{% load feincms_tags %}
<div id="content">
{% block content %}
{% feincms_render_region feincms_page "main" request %}
{% endblock %}
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
{% block sidebar %}
{% feincms_render_region feincms_page "sidebar" request %}
{% endblock %}
</div>
This does exactly the same, but you do not have to loop over the page content blocks yourself. You need to add the request context processor to your list of context processors for this example to work.
Used to let the administrator freely integrate 3rd party applications into the CMS. Described in Integrating 3rd party apps.
Simple contact form. Also serves as an example how forms might be used inside content types.
These are simple content types holding just a file or an image with a position. You should probably use the MediaFileContent though.
Mini-framework for arbitrary file types with customizable rendering methods per-filetype. Add ‘feincms.module.medialibrary’ to INSTALLED_APPS.
Additional arguments for create_content_type():
POSITION_CHOICES: (mandatory)
A list of tuples for the position dropdown.
Raw HTML code, f.e. for flash movies or javascript code.
TinyMCE widget, stripped down to the essentials; no media support, only a few styles activated. The TinyMCE javascript files are not included, you need to put them in the right place on your own.
Please note that you should set the TINYMCE_JS_URL inside your settings, otherwise settings.MEDIA_URL + ‘js/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js’ will be used.
If you pass cleanse=True to the create_content_type invocation for your RichTextContent types, the HTML code will be cleansed right before saving to the database everytime the content is modified.
Additional arguments for create_content_type():
cleanse:
Whether the HTML code should be cleansed of all tags and attributes which are not explicitly whitelisted. The default is False.
A feed reader widget. This also serves as an example how to build a content type that needs additional processing, in this case from a cron job. If an RSS feed has been added to the CMS, manage.py update_rsscontent should be run periodically (either through a cronjob or through other means) to keep the shown content up to date. The feedparser module is required.
Imagine that you have developed a content type which really only makes sense in the sidebar, not in the main content area. It is very simple to restrict a content type to a subset of regions, the only thing you have to do is pass a tuple of region keys to the create_content_type method:
Page.create_content_type(SomeSidebarContent, regions=('sidebar',))
Note that the restriction only influences the content types shown in the “Add new item”-dropdown in the item editor. The user may still choose to add f.e. the SomeSidebarContent to the sidebar, and then proceed to move the content item into the main region.
Because the admin interface is already filled with information, it is sometimes easier to keep the details for certain models outside the CMS content types. Complicated models do not need to be edited directly in the CMS item editor, you can instead use the standard Django administration interface for them, and integrate them into FeinCMS by utilizing foreign keys. Already the bundled FileContent and ImageContent models can be viewed as bad style in this respect, because if you want to use a image or file more than once you need to upload it for every single use instead of being able to reuse the uploaded file. The media library module and MediaFileContent resolve at least this issue nicely by allowing the website administrator to attach meta informations to a file and include it in a page by simply selecting the previously uploaded media file.
So you’d like to check whether Django is properly configured for your content type, or maybe add model/form fields depending on arguments passed at content type creation time? This is very easy to achieve. The only thing you need to do is adding a classmethod named initialize_type() to your content type, and pass additional keyword arguments to create_content_type().
If you want to see an example of these two uses, have a look at the MediaFileContent.
It is generally recommended to use this hook to configure content types compared to putting the configuration into the site-wide settings file. This is, because you might want to configure the content type differently depending on the CMS base model that it is used with.
The concrete content type models are stored in the same module as the CMS base class, but they do not have a name using which you could import them. Accessing internal attributes is hacky, so what is the best way to get a hold onto the concrete content type?
There are two recommended ways. The example use a RawContent content type and the Page CMS base class.
You could take advantage of the fact that create_content_type returns the created model:
from feincms.module.page.models import Page
from feincms.content.raw.models import RawContent
PageRawContent = Page.create_content_type(RawContent)
Or you could use content_type_for():
from feincms.content.raw.models import RawContent
PageRawContent = Page.content_type_for(RawContent)