Articles for Developers

I just wanted to enable autocomplete in my admin interface. It took almost 3 hours to understand whats happening and to make it work, because for integrating in admin interface, the docs is not very clear.

You need to read the docs first

http://django-autocomplete-light.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quick.html

And the read this

Scenario:

class A(models.Model):
    fieldA1 = models.CharField()
    fieldA2 = models.CharField()

class B(models.Model):
    fieldB1 = models.ForeignKey(A)
    fieldB2 = models.CharField()

For having autocomplete in admin interface for model B to the fieldB1, we need

1. API for model A should be exposed

#Create a file autocomplete_light_registry.py in the base folder of the project 
#By registering the modelA, the /autocomplete/AAutocomplete/?q=aa API will be available 
#API will search on fieldA1 to give the result
autocomplete_light.register(A,search_fields=['fieldA1',], )

1. Admin interface should know that fieldB1 should use that exposed API

#admin.py
class BAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
   form = autocomplete_light.modelform_factory(B)
admin.site.register(B, BAdmin)

When I was looking for Django based CMS , Chose Django CMS among many other CMSes.

https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/cms/

The main reason for choosing the Django CMS is , it is a developer friendly CMS.

First, go through the following tutorial

http://docs.django-cms.org/en/2.4.3/getting_started/tutorial.html

Some concepts, which was difficult to understand from the documentation

What is DjangoCMS?

It is a Django application with

• admin interface customised for adding and organising pages
• django template with new template tag “placeholder”, where snippets from different plugins can be displayed
• default plugins
• easy to write plugin interface

How the template works?

Templates are simple django templates with additional template tag called placeholder. This placeholder behaves exactly like django template blocks in the aspect of inheritance. In addition to that, you will be able to add plugins to the placeholder. The plugins can be any static or dynamically generated content.

How to install DjangoCMS with existing website in a specific path instead of root ?

Just add the following the snippet in your urls.py

urlpatterns += patterns('',
    url(r’^mycms/', include('cms.urls')),
)

Why model should always be giving for plugin , even though you dont have data to store?

The following page is a good start on writing plugin

http://docs.django-cms.org/en/2.4.3/extending_cms/custom_plugins.html

from cms.plugin_base import CMSPluginBase
from cms.plugin_pool import plugin_pool
from cms.models.pluginmodel import CMSPlugin
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

class HelloPlugin(CMSPluginBase):
    model = CMSPlugin
    render_template = "hello_plugin.html"

plugin_pool.register_plugin(HelloPlugin)

For any plugin, DjangoCMS should maintain relation between a particular page and our plugin. So, for all the plugin, you need to provide a model CMSPlugin or any model which has inherited CMSPluginBase.