Django-pages

About this project

This project will give you the power of standard CMS (content management system) like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress but with much more speed and simplicity.

It may not have as much plugins and templates like WordPress but it is super simple application with django admin with WYSIWYG editors for page and post editing.

It is designed for easy web content editing with no previous experience in HTML or CSS. Just install it once, use default template or create one for yourself (or hire someone to make it) and use it. There is no maintenance required.

This project is running on this site: Nemec.lu

Installation

Get this application:

pip install django-pages 

Create your project:

Install Django (pip install django)
Create your Django application 

Configure

settings.py

# For better admin interface, add the dashboard:
GRAPPELLI_INDEX_DASHBOARD = 'django_pages.dashboard.DjangoPagesDashboard'

# Add grappelli, filebrowser and django_pages to INSTALLED_APPS:
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'grappelli.dashboard',
    'grappelli',
    ...
    'filebrowser',
    'django_pages'
)

# Set proper MEDIA_ROOT path, and create uploads directory inside.

Your urls.py should contain roughly this, note that django_pages urls MUST be the last:

urlpatterns = patterns(
    '',
    # this is to enable nice looks in admin
    url(r'^grappelli/', include('grappelli.urls')),

    # admin site itself - recommended
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),

    # django-pages url resolver - required
    url(r'', include('django_pages.urls')),
)

Create empty database:

python manage.py migrate

Add superuser:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Run webserver:

run your webserver (nginx/apache/django test server)

Add some nice website content:

go to http://your_site/admin/ and create structure

Use your new webpage!

Configuration

You can override default settings on these values:

ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/static/admin/' This is where django will look for admin static files (for deployment with collectstatic)

FLAG_UPLOAD_DIR = settings.MEDIA_ROOT + '/languages' This is wher language flags will be saved and loaded from

POSTS_ON_PAGE = 10 How many posts on page show

Optional: Set DEBUG = True in settings.py while creating pages to see debugging information

Create website

Go to http://mydomain.example/admin/ (replace mydomain.example with your actual domain)

Login using credentials from command python manage.py syncdb

Create Site

Create Language(s)

Create MenuItems with good url (for SEO) for Menu # example: my-page-that-displays-how-to-cook

Create exactly 1 Page with index set to True

Create Pages with content pointing to MenuItems which create link to that Page

Set Language, Page and others as Active to be displayed

Create 1 Feed Setting, either with information or just deactivated feed (RSS and Atom feed setting)

Optional:
Create Posts on Page (optional: set duration for Post visibility)

SEO:
Create MetaSets for Pages
Create MetaData for MetaSets

Set DEBUG = False in you settings.py after succesfull creation!

Done!

Preview in admin

• Disable active on the page you're working on and save it.
• Click on preview and you can see the resulting page.
• When you're satisfied with it, set it to active again.

Adding Images

You can now add images directly from admin. Select Page/Post you want to edit. Click on Image icon in the editor. Click Browse server. In the new window, either upload your image or select already uploaded image from the files.

Once selected, Image will be automatically selected by the editor, and you can hit OK. It will automatically create link for that image.

Files will be uploaded to your MEDIA_ROOT path into folder uploaded (you can change this in file connector/settings.py - I'm working on making this easier)

Don't forget to set your /media/uploaded/ folder permissions to 775 so you'll be able to save images into it from admin!

Templates

You can now use one of 3 default templates!

The default, which is the first that came with this package, just ordinary white and responsive design, default2 is white design based on twitter bootstrap from bootswatch.com, (default theme) default3 is black design based on twitter bootstrap from bootswatch.com (cyborg theme).

To use any of the builtins, create new item in Admin/Looks/Templates, type in the name (default, default2, default3) and number of posts to display on page.

Note: You need to fiddle with the number of posts, depending on your average post heading length, sometimes when you have long titles, the submenu displaying posts just doesn't work properly.

Copy your custom template into your project's templates folder, and add Template in admin's Looks subsection and set it to active, the system will use your new template automatically.

Note: there is a 30s cache for current template, so after the change in admin, wait a bit for it to display.

Creating custom template

1. In your settings.py, set TEMPLATE_PATH = 'templatename'
2. Copy templates/default to templates/templatename
3. Edit files in templates/templatename to your liking
4. Save your css/js inside your project's /static/ and in base_static.html change path and names inside {% static 'filename' %}

Note: all commands inside {} are django template language, and I suggest you leave it as is, and just change the HTML surrounding it.

I wanted to make templatetags that would just say {% menu %}, {% content %} {% comments %}, but each of these requires some HTML to render them, so it will be as it is for now.

Scheme

Application and database scheme:

Site
Language --> 
    {Multiple menuitems} --> 
        [Page for each menuitem] --> 
            (Multiple Posts for each Page - with pagination) -->
                (Multiple comments for each Post)
        [MetaSet for each page] -->
            (Multiple MetaData for each MetaSet)

Url

Url is following:

http://mydomain.example/language/my-page-with-somethin~page_number/~post

Rules are following:

language - string with 2-3 letters
page - 4-200 letters where allowed is alphabet, digits and - . _
page_number - digits
post - same as page

Note: all of this is generated automatically from DB, you provide country_code for your language which is used as /language part of url. MenuItem url is used as Page url part. Page_number is determined automatically from post count. Post detail url is determined automatically from post title - alphabet lowercase with rules same as page.

Reserved URLs:

/admin/*
/connector/*
/grapelli/*
/rss/
/atom/
/robots.txt
/sitemap.xml

Caching

Django_pages now supports caching in-memory, for some reason django's wrapper @chache_page for specific view caching works without CACHE in settings.py, which is weird at least. I tried memcached, in-memory and without cache, and in-memory had the best results, and you don't even have to configure it. Now it can handle 50 concurrent page acceses in 12ms! (tested with ab -n 1000 -c 50 http://nemec.lu/)

Atom and RSS

Atom and RSS are accessible under /atom/ and /rss/ respectively. Simply add one record into admin Feed Settings, it must contain Site Title, Site Description, and latest post count. You can disable rss and atom feed by disabling it in admin. Any new Posts under any menu/menuitem will be shown in rss/atom feed from newest to oldest.