For the user - Allows for creating a hierarchy of pages, manage publishing, and displaying the pages in the site’s navigation.
For the Developer - Allows for creating custom Content for Pages, which can be customized on a per-project-basis.
Pages
In our pages app, a Page is nothing more than a container for content. A Page does have some of it’s own field and attributes, but these are mostly to set certain publication details etc.
Page Content
Page Content is a seperate model from pages, and this is the actual content for the page. Two of these models already exist within pages, and you are free to use them out-of-the-box, but you can easilly create your own if you need more control over content in your pages.
Start by adding the app to your INSTALLED_APPS
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'ostinato',
'ostinato.pages',
'mptt', # Make sure that mptt is after ostinato.pages
...
)
Now add the ostinato.pages.urls to the end of your urlpatterns. It is important to add this snippet right at the end of the urls.py so that pages doesn’t take priority over your other urlpatterns. That is of course unless you want it to, in which case you can add it where-ever you wish.
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^', include('ostinato.pages.urls')),
)
Remember to run syncdb after you’ve done this.
That’s it, you now have a basic Pages app. We cannot do anything with it yet, since we first need to create actual templates and content. We’ll do this in the next section.
Note
Publication and Timezones
Django 1.4 changed how timezones are treated. So if you mark a page as published, please remember that it is published, relative to the timezone you specified in your settings.py.
Ok, so lets say the client wants a landing page that contains a small intro and content, and a general page that contains only content. It was decided by you that these would all be TextFields.
Lets create these now. You need to place these in your app/project models.py.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | from django.db import models
from ostinato.pages.models import PageContent
from ostinato.pages.regitry import page_content
@page_content.register
class LandingPage(PageContent): # Note the class inheritance
intro = models.TextField()
content = models.TextField()
@page_content.register
class GeneralPage(PageContent):
content = models.TextField()
|
As you can see, these are standard django models, except that we inherit from ostinato.pages.models.PageContent.
You also need to register your model with the page_content registry, as you can see on lines 5 and 10.
Note
Since the content you just created are django models, you need to remember to run syncdb.
If you load up the admin now, you will be able to choose a template for the page.
By default the template used by the page is determined by the page content. The default template location is pages/<content_model_name>.html. So the templates for our two content models (which you’ll need to create now) are:
Note
You can override these templates by using the ContentOptions meta class in your page content model.
class GeneralPage(PageContent):
content = models.TextField()
class ContentOptions:
template = 'some/custom/template.html'
Lets see how we can access the content in the template.
The page view adds page to your context, which is the current page instance. Using that it’s very easy to do something like this:
<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
<p class="byline">Author: {{ page.author }}</p>
That’s all fine, but we have content for a page as well, which is stored in a different model. We include a field on the page called contents, which will get the related page content for you.
In the following example, we assume that you are editing your landing_page.html.
<p>{{ page.contents.intro }}</p>
<p>{{ page.contents.content }}</p>
Note
You can also access the content using the django related field lookups, but this method is very verbose and requires a lot of typing. The related name is in the format of, <app_label>_<model>_content.
<p>{{ page.myapp_landingpage_content.intro }}</p>
<p>{{ page.myapp_landingpage_content.content }}</p>
There are cases where you may want to have a custom view to render your template rather than just using the default view used by ostinato.pages.
One use case for this may be that one of your pages can have a contact form. So you will need a way to add this form to the page context. You also want this page to handle the post request etc.
First you create your view. Note that ostinato.pages makes use of django’s class based views. If you haven’t used them before, then it would help to read up on them.
from ostinato.pages.views import PageView
class ContactView(PageView): # Note we are subclassing PageView
def get(self, *args, **kwargs):
c = self.get_context_data(**kwargs)
c['form'] = ContactForm()
return self.render_to_response(c)
def post(self, *args, **kwargs):
c = self.get_context_data(**kwargs)
## Handle your form ...
return http.HttpResponseRedirect('/some/url/')
In the example above, we created our own view that will add the form to the context, and will also handle the post request. There is nothing special here. It’s just the standard django class based views in action.
One thing to note is that our ContactView inherits from PageView (which in turn inherits from TemplateView). You don’t have to inherit from PageView, but if you don’t, then you need to add the page instance to the context yourself, whereas PageView takes care of that for you.
Next we need to tell the page content model to use this view when it’s being rendered. We do this in the ContentOptions meta class for the page content.
Using our LandingPage example from earlier, we change it like so:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | from django.db import models
from ostinato.pages.models import PageContent
class LandingPage(PageContent):
intro = models.TextField()
content = models.TextField()
class ContentOptions:
view = 'myapp.views.ContactView' # Full import path to your view
|
ostinato.pages also allows you to specify a custom form for page content. You do this in the ContentOptions class like the example below:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | from django.db import models
from ostinato.pages.models import PageContent
class LandingPage(SEOContentMixin, PageContent):
intro = models.TextField()
content = models.TextField()
class ContentOptions:
form = 'myapp.forms.CustomForm' # Full import path to your form
|
As you can see we just added that at the end. Just create your custom form on the import path you specified, and the admin will automatically load the correct form for your page content.
Sometimes you may have two different kinds of pages that share other fields. Lets say for example we have two or more pages that all needs to update our meta title and description tags for SEO.
It is a bit of a waste to have to add those two fields to each of our content models manually, not to mention that it introduces a larger margin for errors.
We use mixins to solve this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | from django.db import models
from ostinato.pages.models import PageContent
class SEOContentMixin(models.Model): # Note it's a standard model...
keywords = models.CharField(max_length=200)
description = models.TextField()
class Meta:
abstract = True # ...and _must_ be abstract
class LandingPage(SEOContentMixin, PageContent):
intro = models.TextField()
content = models.TextField()
|
The two points you have to be aware of here:
ostinato.pages.workflow provides a default statemachine that is used by the page model. Sometimes, you may want to create a different workflow for the pages based on client requirements.
To do this, you just create your custom statemachine as mentioned in the ostinato.statemachine documentation, and then tell ostinato.pages which class to use by adding the following in your settings.py:
OSTINATO_PAGES_WORKFLOW_CLASS = "myapp.customworkflow.SomeWorkflow"
When creating your custom workfow, do remember that the Page state is stored as an IntegerField, so make sure that you use the IntegerStatemachine so subclass your own statemachine class.
There are cases where you want a specific page to have extra inline fields, based on the chosen template. We have provided you with this capability through the PageContent model.
First you need to create the model that should be related to your page.
1 2 3 4 5 6 | from django.db import models
from ostinato.pages.models import Page
class Contributor(models.Model):
page = models.ForeignKey(Page)
name = models.CharField(max_lenght=50)
|
Next, you need to create your inline class (usually done in admin.py).
1 2 3 4 | from django.contrib import admin
class ContributorInline(admin.StackedInline):
model = Contributor
|
Right, after a quick syncdb, we are ready to add this to our page content. Lets say that we want to add contributors to our LandingPage from earlier:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | ...
class LandingPage(SEOContentMixin, PageContent):
intro = models.TextField()
content = models.TextField()
class ContentOptions:
admin_inlines = ['myapp.admin.ContributorInline']
...
|
If you load up the django admin now, and edit a Landing Page, you should see the extra inline model fields below your PageContent.
To access the related set in your template, just do it as normal.
{% for contributor in page.contributor_set.all %}
{{ contributor.name }}
{% endfor %}
ostinato.pages comes with a couple of tempalate tags and filters to help with some of the more common tasks.
navbar(for_page=None)
A inclusion tag that renders the navbar, for the root by default. It will render all child pages for the node. This tag will only render pages that has show_in_nav selected and is published.
{% load pages_tags %}
{% navbar %}
This inclusion tag uses pages/navbar.html to render the nav, just in case you want to customize it.
This inclusion tag can also take a extra arument to render the children for a specific page.
{% load pages_tags %}
{% navbar for_page=page %}
The navbar tag also allows has the ability to “discover” a page, based on the path. This is helpful if you are on a page that isn’t a ostinato page, but a page-slug does exist in the url path, and you want that page to be highlighted as the active page.
{% load pages_tags %}
{% navbar path=request.path %}
Note that in the example above, you will need to add the django request context-processor.
get_page(slug)
A simple tag that will get a page by the slug, and add it to the context.
{% load pages_tags %}
{% get_page 'page-1' as mypage %}
<h1>{{ mypage.title }}</h1>