Apphooks

Right now, our Django Polls application is statically hooked into the project’s urls.py. This is all right, but we can do more, by attaching applications to django CMS pages.

Create an apphook

We do this with an apphook, created using a CMSApp sub-class, which tells the CMS how to include that application.

Apphooks live in a file called cms_apps.py, so create one in your Polls/CMS Integration application, i.e. in polls_cms_integration.

This is the most basic example of an apphook for a django CMS application:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from cms.app_base import CMSApp
from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool
class PollsApphook(CMSApp):
    name = _("Polls Application")   # give your application a name
    urls = ["polls.urls"]           # link it to URL configuration(s)
    app_name = "polls"              # set the default application namespace
apphook_pool.register(PollsApphook)  # register the application

Restart the runserver. This is necessary because we have created a new file containing Python code that won’t be loaded until the server restarts. You only have to do this the first time the new file has been created.

Apply the apphook to a page

Now we need to create a new page, and attach the Polls application to it through this apphook.

Create and save a new page, then publish it.

Note

Your apphook won’t work until the page has been published.

In its Advanced settings, choose “Polls Application” from the Application menu. Leave the Application instance name on the provided default (polls), and save once more.

Refresh the page, and you’ll find that the Polls application, along with any polls you have created, is now available directly from the new django CMS page.

You can now remove the mention of the Polls application (url(r'^polls/', include('polls.urls', namespace='polls'))) from your project’s urls.py - it’s no longer even required there.