3. App Integration

It is pretty easy to integrate your own Django applications with django CMS. You have 5 ways of integrating your app:

  1. Menus

    Statically extend the menu entries

  2. Attach Menus

    Attach your menu to a page.

  3. App-Hooks

    Attach whole apps with optional menu to a page.

  4. Navigation Modifiers

    Modify the whole menu tree

  5. Custom Plugins

    Display your models / content in cms pages

3.1. Menus

Create a menu.py in your application and write the following inside:

  1. from menus.base import Menu, NavigationNode
  2. from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
  3. from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
  4. class TestMenu(Menu):
  5. def get_nodes(self, request):
  6. nodes = []
  7. n = NavigationNode(_('sample root page'), "/", 1)
  8. n2 = NavigationNode(_('sample settings page'), "/bye/", 2)
  9. n3 = NavigationNode(_('sample account page'), "/hello/", 3)
  10. n4 = NavigationNode(_('sample my profile page'), "/hello/world/", 4, 3)
  11. nodes.append(n)
  12. nodes.append(n2)
  13. nodes.append(n3)
  14. nodes.append(n4)
  15. return nodes
  16. menu_pool.register_menu(TestMenu)

If you refresh a page you should now see the menu entries from above. The get_nodes function should return a list of NavigationNode instances. A NavigationNode takes the following arguments:

  • title

    What the menu entry should read as

  • url,

    Link if menu entry is clicked.

  • id

    A unique id for this menu.

  • parent_id=None

    If this is a child of another node supply the the id of the parent here.

  • parent_namespace=None

    If the parent node is not from this menu you can give it the parent namespace. The namespace is the name of the class. In the above example that would be: “TestMenu”

  • attr=None

    A dictionary of additional attributes you may want to use in a modifier or in the template.

  • visible=True

    Whether or not this menu item should be visible.

Additionally, each NavigationNode provides a number of methods which are detailed in the NavigationNode API references.

3.2. Attach Menus

Classes that extend from menus.base.Menu always get attached to the root. But if you want the menu to be attached to a CMS Page you can do that as well.

Instead of extending from Menu you need to extend from cms.menu_bases.CMSAttachMenu and you need to define a name. We will do that with the example from above:

  1. from menus.base import NavigationNode
  2. from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
  3. from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
  4. from cms.menu_bases import CMSAttachMenu
  5. class TestMenu(CMSAttachMenu):
  6. name = _("test menu")
  7. def get_nodes(self, request):
  8. nodes = []
  9. n = NavigationNode(_('sample root page'), "/", 1)
  10. n2 = NavigationNode(_('sample settings page'), "/bye/", 2)
  11. n3 = NavigationNode(_('sample account page'), "/hello/", 3)
  12. n4 = NavigationNode(_('sample my profile page'), "/hello/world/", 4, 3)
  13. nodes.append(n)
  14. nodes.append(n2)
  15. nodes.append(n3)
  16. nodes.append(n4)
  17. return nodes
  18. menu_pool.register_menu(TestMenu)

Now you can link this Menu to a page in the ‘Advanced’ tab of the page settings under attached menu.

Each must have a get_menu_title() method, a get_absolute_url() method, and a childrens list with all of its children inside (the ‘s’ at the end of childrens is done on purpose because children is already taken by django-mptt).

Be sure that get_menu_title() and get_absolute_url() don’t trigger any queries when called in a template or you may have some serious performance and database problems with a lot of queries.

It may be wise to cache the output of get_nodes(). For this you may need to write a wrapper class because of dynamic content that the pickle module can’t handle.

If you want to display some static pages in the navigation (“login”, for example) you can write your own “dummy” class that adheres to the conventions described above.

A base class for this purpose can be found in cms/utils/navigation.py

3.3. App-Hooks

With App-Hooks you can attach whole Django applications to pages. For example you have a news app and you want it attached to your news page.

To create an apphook create a cms_app.py in your application. And in it write the following:

  1. from cms.app_base import CMSApp
  2. from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool
  3. from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
  4. class MyApphook(CMSApp):
  5. name = _("My Apphook")
  6. urls = ["myapp.urls"]
  7. apphook_pool.register(MyApphook)

Replace myapp.urls with the path to your applications urls.py.

Now edit a page and open the advanced settings tab. Select your new apphook under “Application”. Save the page.

Warning

If you are on a multi-threaded server (mostly all webservers, except the dev-server): Restart the server because the URLs are cached by Django and in a multi-threaded environment we don’t know which caches are cleared yet.

Note

If at some point you want to remove this apphook after deleting the cms_app.py there is a cms management command called uninstall apphooks that removes the specified apphook(s) from all pages by name. eg. manage.py cms uninstall apphooks MyApphook. To find all names for uninstallable apphooks there is a command for this as well manage.py cms list apphooks.

If you attached the app to a page with the url /hello/world/ and the app has a urls.py that looks like this:

  1. from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
  2. urlpatterns = patterns('sampleapp.views',
  3. url(r'^$', 'main_view', name='app_main'),
  4. url(r'^sublevel/$', 'sample_view', name='app_sublevel'),
  5. )

The main_view should now be available at /hello/world/ and the sample_view has the url /hello/world/sublevel/.

Note

All views that are attached like this must return a RequestContext instance instead of the default Context instance.

3.3.1. Language Namespaces

An additional feature of apphooks is that if you use the cms.middleware.multilingual.MultilingualURLMiddleware all apphook urls are language namespaced.

What this means:

To reverse the first url from above you would use something like this in your template:

  1. {% url app_main %}

If you want to access the same url but in a different language use a language namespace:

  1. {% url de:app_main %}
  2. {% url en:app_main %}
  3. {% url fr:app_main %}

If you want to add a menu to that page as well that may represent some views in your app add it to your apphook like this:

  1. from myapp.menu import MyAppMenu
  2. class MyApphook(CMSApp):
  3. name = _("My Apphook")
  4. urls = ["myapp.urls"]
  5. menus = [MyAppMenu]
  6. apphook_pool.register(MyApphook)

For an example if your app has a Category model and you want this category model to be displayed in the menu when you attach the app to a page. We assume the following model:

  1. from django.db import models
  2. from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
  3. import mptt
  4. class Category(models.Model):
  5. parent = models.ForeignKey('self', blank=True, null=True)
  6. name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
  7. def __unicode__(self):
  8. return self.name
  9. def get_absolute_url(self):
  10. return reverse('category_view', args=[self.pk])
  11. try:
  12. mptt.register(Category)
  13. except mptt.AlreadyRegistered:
  14. pass

We would now create a menu out of these categories:

  1. from menus.base import NavigationNode
  2. from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
  3. from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
  4. from cms.menu_bases import CMSAttachMenu
  5. from myapp.models import Category
  6. class CategoryMenu(CMSAttachMenu):
  7. name = _("test menu")
  8. def get_nodes(self, request):
  9. nodes = []
  10. for category in Category.objects.all().order_by("tree_id", "lft"):
  11. node = NavigationNode(
  12. category.name,
  13. category.get_absolute_url(),
  14. category.pk,
  15. category.parent_id
  16. )
  17. nodes.append(node)
  18. return nodes
  19. menu_pool.register_menu(CategoryMenu)

If you add this menu now to your app-hook:

  1. from myapp.menus import CategoryMenu
  2. class MyApphook(CMSApp):
  3. name = _("My Apphook")
  4. urls = ["myapp.urls"]
  5. menus = [MyAppMenu, CategoryMenu]

You get the static entries of MyAppMenu and the dynamic entries of CategoryMenu both attached to the same page.

3.4. Navigation Modifiers

Navigation Modifiers give your application access to navigation menus.

A modifier can change the properties of existing nodes or rearrange entire menus.

3.4.1. An example use-case

A simple example: you have a news application that publishes pages independently of django CMS. However, you would like to integrate the application into the menu structure of your site, so that at appropriate places a News node appears in the navigation menu.

In such a case, a Navigation Modifier is the solution.

3.4.2. How it works

Normally, you’d want to place modifiers in your application’s menu.py.

To make your modifier available, it then needs to be registered with menus.menu_pool.menu_pool.

Now, when a page is loaded and the menu generated, your modifier will be able to inspect and modify its nodes.

A simple modifier looks something like this:

  1. from menus.base import Modifier
  2. from menus.menu_pool import menu_pool
  3. class MyMode(Modifier):
  4. """
  5. """
  6. def modify(self, request, nodes, namespace, root_id, post_cut, breadcrumb):
  7. if post_cut:
  8. return nodes
  9. count = 0
  10. for node in nodes:
  11. node.counter = count
  12. count += 1
  13. return nodes
  14. menu_pool.register_modifier(MyMode)

It has a method modify() that should return a list of NavigationNode instances. modify() should take the following arguments:

  • request

    A Django request instance. You want to modify based on sessions, or user or permissions?

  • nodes

    All the nodes. Normally you want to return them again.

  • namespace

    A Menu Namespace. Only given if somebody requested a menu with only nodes from this namespace.

  • root_id

    Was a menu request based on an ID?

  • post_cut

    Every modifier is called two times. First on the whole tree. After that the tree gets cut to only show the nodes that are shown in the current menu. After the cut the modifiers are called again with the final tree. If this is the case post_cut is True.

  • breadcrumb

    Is this not a menu call but a breadcrumb call?

Here is an example of a built-in modifier that marks all node levels:

  1. class Level(Modifier):
  2. """
  3. marks all node levels
  4. """
  5. post_cut = True
  6. def modify(self, request, nodes, namespace, root_id, post_cut, breadcrumb):
  7. if breadcrumb:
  8. return nodes
  9. for node in nodes:
  10. if not node.parent:
  11. if post_cut:
  12. node.menu_level = 0
  13. else:
  14. node.level = 0
  15. self.mark_levels(node, post_cut)
  16. return nodes
  17. def mark_levels(self, node, post_cut):
  18. for child in node.children:
  19. if post_cut:
  20. child.menu_level = node.menu_level + 1
  21. else:
  22. child.level = node.level + 1
  23. self.mark_levels(child, post_cut)
  24. menu_pool.register_modifier(Level)

3.5. Custom Plugins

If you want to display content of your apps on other pages custom plugins are a great way to accomplish that. For example, if you have a news app and you want to display the top 10 news entries on your homepage, a custom plugin is the way to go.

For a detailed explanation on how to write custom plugins please head over to the Custom Plugins section.