django-ninecms 0.5.0

Objectives

It is the author’s opinion that heavyweight content management systems are not so important, as much as established CMS are important to other languages such as PHP. Django can be very easily used to build exotic web applications in very short time. Therefore Django too often does not need another heavyweight CMS. Nine CMS is intended to provide a common denominator for simple content when building a Django app or for small sites.

To sum up:

• Lightweight

• Easy to start up AND customize a project

• Inspired by Drupal node model architecture

• Obviously uses the Django web framework on Python

Features

• Node modeling inspired by Drupal nodes featuring:

• Dynamic content (obviously) rendered as nodes

• Revisioning system

• Internationalisation (i18n) right from the beginning

• URL aliases that may be automatically generated based on provided patterns

• Page types that may be used in different templates or views (below)

• Per page type permissions

• Sanitize HTML

• Content blocks

• Menus

• Media management

• Images, videos, files

• Image styles

• Views (requires decoupled signals providing context)

• Taxonomy (terms)

• Contact form

• Admin interface with dashboard

• Utilities

• Libraries

• Character transliteration

• Serializers

• Custom tags

• Basic search functionality

• Template suggestions

• Bootstrap

Dependencies

It is intented to keep the number of external dependencies as low as possible, if no significant reason is necessary. The following are needed:

• Python (3.4+)

• Django (1.8+): Web framework

• django-guardian (1.3+): provide per-page-type permissions

• django-mptt (0.7+): provide trees for tags and menus

• bleach (1.4+): bleach-sanitize user HTML

• Pillow (3+): create different sizes for user images

• pytz (2015+): handle user time zones

The following packages are optional/recommended:

• django-admin-bootstrapped (2.5+): provide a nicer admin interface experience

• django-admin-bootstrapped-plus: improve the admin interface to use in 9cms

• django-bootstrap3: improve the admin fields

• django-debug-toolbar: for obvious reasons

• mysqlclient: or any other db connector

• newrelic: or any other monitoring tool

• python3-memcached: for memory caching

New project guide

This is a full guide to create a new project. Soon a Quick Guide will be added.

1. Create a new project

Create a new project, if not existing, and optionally (as a reminder):

• Create new virtualenv

• Initialize git and initial commit

2. Add 9cms

• Download source and place in project root

• Or if in existing folder:

  $ rsync -rtv --delete --exclude=.* path/to/ninecms path/to/project/

• Soon available as python package

3. Dependencies:

• Add the following to the requirements.txt file:

  bleach==1.4.2
  Django==1.8.6
  django-guardian==1.3.2
  django-mptt==0.7.4
  Pillow==3.0.0
  pytz==2015.7

• And optionally:

  coverage==4.0.2
  django-admin-bootstrapped==2.5.6
  django-bootstrap3==6.2.2
  django-debug-toolbar==1.4.0
  mysqlclient==1.3.7
  newrelic==2.58.0.43
  python3-memcached==1.51
  sqlparse==0.1.18

• Then run:

  $ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Settings

All relevant settings sample also exist in ninecms/settings.py as comment. From the code samples below remove any settings refer to optional packages that are not installed as above.

• INSTALLED_APPS setting:

  INSTALLED_APPS = (
      'admin_bootstrapped_plus',
      'django_admin_bootstrapped',
      'django.contrib.admin',
      'django.contrib.auth',
      'django.contrib.contenttypes',
      'django.contrib.sessions',
      'django.contrib.messages',
      'django.contrib.staticfiles',
      'mptt',
      'debug_toolbar',
      'guardian',
      'ninecms',
      # ...
  )

• Middleware:

  MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
      'django.middleware.cache.UpdateCacheMiddleware',
      'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
      'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
      'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
      'django.middleware.cache.FetchFromCacheMiddleware',
      'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
      'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
      'django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware',
      'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
      'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
      'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
  )

• Templates

Add 'debug': True only if planning to have a separate live settings file for your project:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [
            os.path.join(BASE_DIR,  'templates'),
        ],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
            ],
            'debug': True,
        },
    },
]

• Languages:

  LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'  # or whatever
  LANGUAGES = (
      ('en', 'English'),
      # ('el', 'Greek'),
      # ...
  )
  TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Athens'  # or whatever
  USE_I18N = True
  USE_L10N = True
  USE_TZ = True

• Media:

  MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'media')
  MEDIA_URL = '/media/'

• Error reporting:

  ADMINS = (
      ("Webmaster", "web@9-dev.com"),
  )
  MANAGERS = (
      ("Webmaster", "web@9-dev.com"),
  )
  EMAIL_HOST = 'mail.9-dev.com'
  EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'do-not-reply@9-dev.com'
  EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = ''
  EMAIL_USE_SSL = True
  EMAIL_PORT = 465
  EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX = '[9cms] '
  SERVER_EMAIL = 'do-not-reply@9-dev.com'
  DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = 'do-not-reply@9-dev.com'

• Security:

Replace myapp:

LOGIN_URL = '/admin/login/'
SECURE_CONTENT_TYPE_NOSNIFF = True
SECURE_BROWSER_XSS_FILTER = True
X_FRAME_OPTIONS = 'DENY'
CSRF_COOKIE_HTTPONLY = True
SESSION_COOKIE_NAME = 'myapp_sessionid'

• Caches:

  CACHES = {
      'default': {
          'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.dummy.DummyCache',
      }
  }
  CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS = 3 * 60 * 60  # or whatever

• Guardian:

  AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
      'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',  # this is default
      'guardian.backends.ObjectPermissionBackend',
  )
  ANONYMOUS_USER_ID = -1

• Django admin:

  DAB_FIELD_RENDERER = 'django_admin_bootstrapped.renderers.BootstrapFieldRenderer'
  MESSAGE_TAGS = {
      messages.SUCCESS: 'alert-success success',
      messages.WARNING: 'alert-warning warning',
      messages.ERROR: 'alert-danger error'
  }

• CMS settings:

  from ninecms.settings import *
  SITE_NAME = "..."
  SITE_AUTHOR = "..."
  SITE_KEYWORDS = "..."
  I18N_URLS = True  # False

• Optional settings for testing (separate file eg settings_test.py):

  from myapp.settings import *
  DEBUG = True
  PASSWORD_HASHERS = (
      'django.contrib.auth.hashers.MD5PasswordHasher',
  )
  TEMPLATES = [
      {
          'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
          'DIRS': [  # disable overriden templates
          ],
          'APP_DIRS': True,
          'OPTIONS': {
              'context_processors': [
                  'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                  'django.template.context_processors.request',
                  'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                  'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
              ],
              'debug': True,
          },
      },
  ]
  DATABASES = {
      'default': {
          'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
          'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
      }
  }
  LANGUAGES = (  # at least 2
      ('el', 'Greek'),
      ('en', 'English'),
  )
  IMAGE_STYLES.update({
      'thumbnail-upscale': {
          'type': 'thumbnail-upscale',
          'size': (150, 150)
      },
  })

• Optional settings for live (separate file eg settings_live.py):

  from myapp.settings import *
  DEBUG = False
  ALLOWED_HOSTS = [
      # ...
  ]
  TEMPLATES = [
      {
          'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
          'DIRS': [
              os.path.join(BASE_DIR,  'templates'),
          ],
          'APP_DIRS': True,
          'OPTIONS': {
              'context_processors': [
                  'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                  'django.template.context_processors.request',
                  'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                  'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
              ],
          },
      },
  ]
  STATIC_ROOT =  # ...
  STATICFILES_DIRS = []
  CACHES = {
      'default': {
          'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache',
          'LOCATION': '127.0.0.1:11211',
          'TIMEOUT': # ...
          'KEY_PREFIX': # ...
          'VERSION': 1,
      }
  }

5. Create empty folders in project root:

• /static/

• /media/

• Optionally copy folder ninecms/basic/image/ to /media/ninecms/basic/image if you intend to run ninecms tests

6. Run ./manage.py migrate to create the models.

7. Url configuration

• Include the URL configurations for admin, i18n and 9cms

• Make sure 9cms URL conf is the last line so the dynamic router catches all URLs.

• Include robots.txt

• Include static files for local server

URL Example:

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),
    url(r'^robots\.txt/$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='ninecms/robots.txt', content_type='text/plain')),
]

# static files (images, css, javascript, etc.)
if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)  # pragma: no cover

# Last: all remaining pass to CMS
if settings.I18N_URLS:  # pragma: nocover
    urlpatterns += i18n_patterns(
        url(r'^', include('ninecms.urls', namespace='ninecms')),
    )
else:  # pragma: nocover
    urlpatterns += [
        url(r'^', include('ninecms.urls', namespace='ninecms')),
    ]

8. Start the development server and visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ (you’ll need the Admin app enabled).

9. Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/ to view content.

From here on common tasks include:

• Override templates such as:

• index.html

• site-name.html

• block_content.html and block_static.html (optionally, to fine tune the fields present and therefore to reduce the number of queries executed)

• Add page types

• Add content

• Add menus

• Add blocks

Views

Add a new Django app in your project with signals.py to listen to the corresponding signal that is declared with a new content block in admin. Look at the ninecms/signals.py file on how to code the signals.

Theme suggestions

Add a file in the project’s templates folder, with the following names, in order to override a 9cms template.

• content: [block_content]_[page_type]_[node_id] (eg block_content_basic_5.html)

• static node: [block_static]_[region]_[alias] (eg block_static_header_blog_1.html)

• menu: [block_menu]_[region]_[menu.id] (eg block_menu_header_1.html)

• signal (view): [block_signal]_[region]_[signal] (eg block_signal_header_random_video_node.html)

• contact form: [block_contact]_[region]

• language menu: [block_language]_[region]

Any combination of [] is allowed, eg. block_content_basic.html or block_content_5.html. Always append .html extension.

Permissions summary

This is a summary of all applicable permissions:

• Django admin:

• User: is staff (access to admin)

• User: is superuser (with caution)

• unconditional access everywhere

• additional fields for nodes

• dashboard

• utilities on dashboard

• User: add, change, delete

• Group: add, change, delete

• Permission: add, change, delete

• Guardian:

• User-object permissions: add, change, delete

• Group-object permissions: add, change, delete

• 9cms:

• Per model permissions: add, change, delete

• Node: can use full HTML

• Node: view unpublished

• Per content type group permissions (provided from Guardian, accessible through ‘page types’ change-list admin page)

Example of configuration of an editor group perms:

• Node: view unpublished

• Node: add

• Node: change

• Image: add, change, delete

• Page type specific permissions: add, change

Important points

• If i18n urls: menu items for internal pages should always have language [v0.3.1a]

• Theme suggestions [v0.4.4b]

• Search page requires a search results block in page type and ‘search’ alias, requires MySQL [v0.4.4b]

• When serializing related field using table__field notation, always add select_related to query prior calling serialize [v0.4.7b]

• Add LANGUAGES in settings_test when I18N_URLS (see aluminium( [v0.4.7b]

Footnote

Any contribution to the project is highly appreciated and the best will be done to respond to it.