Integrating a third-party application

We’ve already written our own django CMS plugins and apps, but now we want to extend our CMS with a third-party application, Aldryn News & Blog.

Basic installation

First, we need to install the app into our virtual environment from PyPI:

  1. pip install aldryn-newsblog

Django settings

INSTALLED_APPS

Add the application and any of its requirements that are not there already to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. Some will be already present; it’s up to you to check them because you need to avoid duplication:

  1. # you will probably need to add:
  2. 'aldryn_apphooks_config',
  3. 'aldryn_boilerplates',
  4. 'aldryn_categories',
  5. 'aldryn_newsblog',
  6. 'aldryn_people',
  7. 'aldryn_reversion',
  8. 'djangocms_text_ckeditor',
  9. 'parler',
  10. 'sortedm2m',
  11. 'taggit',
  13. # and you will probably find the following already listed:
  14. 'easy_thumbnails',
  15. 'filer',
  16. 'reversion',

THUMBNAIL_PROCESSORS

One of the dependencies is Django Filer. It provides a special feature that allows more sophisticated image cropping. For this to work it needs its own thumbnail processor (filer.thumbnail_processors.scale_and_crop_with_subject_location) to be listed in settings.py in place of easy_thumbnails.processors.scale_and_crop:

  1.  THUMBNAIL_PROCESSORS = (
  2.      'easy_thumbnails.processors.colorspace',
  3.      'easy_thumbnails.processors.autocrop',
  4.      # 'easy_thumbnails.processors.scale_and_crop',  # disable this one
  5.      'filer.thumbnail_processors.scale_and_crop_with_subject_location',
  6.      'easy_thumbnails.processors.filters',
  7.  )

ALDRYN_BOILERPLATE_NAME

Aldryn News & Blog uses aldryn-boilerplates to provide multiple sets of templates and static files for different CSS frameworks. We’re using the Bootstrap 3 in this tutorial, so let’s choose bootstrap3 by adding the setting:

  1. ALDRYN_BOILERPLATE_NAME='bootstrap3'

STATICFILES_FINDERS

Add the boilerplates static files finder to STATICFILES_FINDERS, immediately before django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder:

  1.  STATICFILES_FINDERS = [
  2.      'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder',
  3.      'aldryn_boilerplates.staticfile_finders.AppDirectoriesFinder',
  4.      'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder',
  5.  ]

If STATICFILES_FINDERS is not defined in your settings.py just copy and paste the code above.

TEMPLATES

Important

In Django 1.8, the TEMPLATE_LOADERS and TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS settings are rolled into the TEMPLATES setting. We’re assuming you’re using Django 1.8 here.

  1.  TEMPLATES = [
  2.      {
  3.          # ...
  4.          'OPTIONS': {
  5.              'context_processors': [
  6.                  # ...
  7.                  'aldryn_boilerplates.context_processors.boilerplate',
  8.                  ],
  9.              'loaders': [
  10.                  # ...
  11.                  'aldryn_boilerplates.template_loaders.AppDirectoriesLoader',
  12.                  ],
  13.              },
  14.          },
  15.      ]

Migrate the database

We’ve added a new application so we need to update our database:

  1. python manage.py migrate

Start the server again.

Create a new apphooked page

The News & Blog application comes with a django CMS apphook, so add a new django CMS page (call it News), and add the News & Blog application to it just as you did for Polls.

For this application we also need to create and select an Application configuration.

Give this application configuration some settings:

  • Instance namespace: news (this is used for reversing URLs)
  • Application title: News (the name that will represent the application configuration in the admin)
  • Permalink type: choose a format you prefer for news article URLs

Save this application configuration, and make sure it’s selected in Application configurations.

Publish the new page, and you should find the News & Blog application at work there. (Until you actually create any articles, it will simply inform you that there are No items available.)

Add new News & Blog articles

You can add new articles using the admin or the new News menu that now appears in the toolbar when you are on a page belonging to News & Blog.

You can also insert a Latest articles plugin into another page - like all good django CMS applications, Aldryn News & Blog comes with plugins.