==================== Content Architecture ==================== Mezzanine primarily revolves around the models found in two packages, ``mezzanine.core`` and ``mezzanine.pages``. This section describes these models and how to extend them to create your own custom content for a Mezzanine site. The ``Page`` Model ================== The foundation of a Mezzanine site is the model ``mezzanine.pages.models.Page``. Each ``Page`` instance is stored in a hierarchical tree to form the site's navigation, and an interface for managing the structure of the navigation tree is provided in the admin via ``mezzanine.pages.admin.PageAdmin``. All types of content inherit from the ``Page`` model and Mezzanine provides a default content type via the ``mezzanine.pages.models.RichTextPage`` model which simply contains a WYSIWYG editable field for managing HTML content. .. _creating-custom-content-types: Creating Custom Content Types ============================= In order to handle different types of pages that require more structured content than provided by the ``RichTextPage`` model, you can simply create your own models that inherit from ``Page``. For example if we wanted to have pages that were authors with books:: from django.db import models from mezzanine.pages.models import Page # The members of Page will be inherited by the Author model, such # as title, slug, etc. For authors we can use the title field to # store the author's name. For our model definition, we just add # any extra fields that aren't part of the Page model, in this # case, date of birth. class Author(Page): dob = models.DateField("Date of birth") class Book(models.Model): author = models.ForeignKey("Author") cover = models.ImageField(upload_to="authors") Next you'll need to register your model with Django's admin to make it available as a content type. If your content type only exposes some new fields that you'd like to make editable in the admin, you can simply register your model using the ``mezzanine.pages.admin.PageAdmin`` class:: from django.contrib import admin from mezzanine.pages.admin import PageAdmin from .models import Author admin.site.register(Author, PageAdmin) Any regular model fields on your content type will be available when adding or changing an instance of it in the admin. This is similar to Django's behaviour when registering models in the admin without using an admin class, or when using an admin class without fieldsets defined. In these cases all the fields on the model are available in the admin. If however you need to customize your admin class, you can inherit from ``PageAdmin`` and implement your own admin class. The only difference is that you'll need to take a copy of ``PageAdmin.fieldsets`` and modify it if you want to implement your own fieldsets, otherwise you'll lose the fields that the ``Page`` model implements:: from copy import deepcopy from django.contrib import admin from mezzanine.pages.admin import PageAdmin from .models import Author, Book author_extra_fieldsets = ((None, {"fields": ("dob",)}),) class BookInline(admin.TabularInline): model = Book class AuthorAdmin(PageAdmin): inlines = (BookInline,) fieldsets = deepcopy(PageAdmin.fieldsets) + author_extra_fieldsets admin.site.register(Author, AuthorAdmin) When registering content type models with ``PageAdmin`` or subclasses of it, the admin class won't be listed in the admin index page, instead being made available as a type of ``Page`` when creating new pages from the navigation tree. .. note:: When creating custom content types, you must inherit directly from the ``Page`` model. Further levels of subclassing are currently not supported. Therefore you cannot subclass the ``RichTextPage`` or any other custom content types you create yourself. Should you need to implement a WYSIWYG editable field in the way the ``RichTextPage`` model does, you can simply subclass both ``Page`` and ``RichText``, the latter being imported from ``mezzanine.core.models``. Displaying Custom Content Types =============================== When creating models that inherit from the ``Page`` model, multi-table inheritance is used under the hood. This means that when dealing with the page object, an attribute is created from the subclass model's name. So given a ``Page`` instance using the previous example, accessing the ``Author`` instance would be as follows:: >>> Author.objects.create(title="Dr Seuss") >>> page = Page.objects.get(title="Dr Seuss") >>> page.author And in a template::

{{ page.author.title }}

{{ page.author.dob }}

{% for book in page.author.book_set.all %} {% endfor %} The ``Page`` model also contains the method ``Page.get_content_model`` for retrieving the custom instance without knowing its type:: >>> page.get_content_model() Page Templates ============== The view function ``mezzanine.pages.views.page`` handles returning a ``Page`` instance to a template. By default the template ``pages/page.html`` is used, but if a custom template exists it will be used instead. The check for a custom template will first check for a template with the same name as the ``Page`` instance's slug, and if not then a template with a name derived from the subclass model's name is checked for. So given the above example the templates ``pages/dr-seuss.html`` and ``pages/author.html`` would be checked for respectively. The view function further looks through the parent hierarchy of the ``Page``. If a ``Page`` instance with slug ``authors/dr-seuss`` is a child of the ``Page`` with slug ``authors``, the templates ``pages/authors/dr-seuss.html``, ``pages/authors/dr-seuss/author.html``, ``pages/authors/author.html``, ``pages/author.html``, and ``pages/page.html`` would be checked for respectively. This lets you specify a template for all children of a ``Page`` and a different template for the ``Page`` itself. For example, if an additional author were added as a child page of ``authors/dr-seuss`` with the slug ``authors/dr-seuss/theo-lesieg``, the template ``pages/authors/dr-seuss/author.html`` would be among those checked. Overriding vs Extending Templates ================================= A typical problem that reusable Django apps face, is being able to extend the app's templates rather than overriding them. The app will usually provide templates that the app will look for by name, which allows the developer to create their own versions of the templates in their project's templates directory. However if the template is sufficiently complex, with a good range of extendable template blocks, they need to duplicate all of the features of the template within their own version. This may cause the project's version of the templates to become incompatible as new versions of the upstream app become available. Ideally we would be able to use Django's ``extends`` tag to extend the app's template instead, and only override the template blocks we're interested in. The problem with this however, is that the app will attempt to load the template with a specific name, so we can't override *and* extend a template at the same time, as circular inheritance will occur, e.g. Django thinks the template is trying to extend itself, which is impossible. To solve this problem, Mezzanine provides the ``overextends`` template tag, which allows you to extend a template with the same name. The ``overextends`` tag works the same way as Django's ``extends`` tag, (in fact it subclasses it), so it must be the first tag in the template. What it does differently is that the template using it will be excluded from loading when Django searches for the template to extend from. Page Processors =============== So far we've covered how to create and display custom types of pages, but what if we want to extend them further with more advanced features? For example adding a form to the page and handling when a user submits the form. This type of logic would typically go into a view function, but since every ``Page`` instance is handled via the view function ``mezzanine.pages.views.page`` we can't create our own views for pages. Mezzanine solves this problem using *Page Processors*. *Page Processors* are simply functions that can be associated to any custom ``Page`` models and are then called inside the ``mezzanine.pages.views.page`` view when viewing the associated ``Page`` instance. A Page Processor will always be passed two arguments - the request and the ``Page`` instance, and can either return a dictionary that will be added to the template context, or it can return any of Django's ``HttpResponse`` classes which will override the ``mezzanine.pages.views.page`` view entirely. To associate a Page Processor to a custom ``Page`` model you must create the function for it in a module called ``page_processors.py`` inside one of your ``INSTALLED_APPS`` and decorate it using the decorator ``mezzanine.pages.page_processors.processor_for``. Continuing on from our author example, suppose we want to add an enquiry form to each author page. Our ``page_processors.py`` module in the author app would be as follows:: from django import forms from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect from mezzanine.pages.page_processors import processor_for from .models import Author class AuthorForm(forms.Form): name = forms.CharField() email = forms.EmailField() @processor_for(Author) def author_form(request, page): form = AuthorForm() if request.method == "POST": form = AuthorForm(request.POST) if form.is_valid(): # Form processing goes here. redirect = request.path + "?submitted=true" return HttpResponseRedirect(redirect) return {"form": form} The ``processor_for`` decorator can also be given a ``slug`` argument rather than a Page subclass. In this case the Page Processor will be run when the exact slug matches the page being viewed. Page Permissions ================ The navigation tree in the admin where pages are managed will take into account any permissions defined using `Django's permission system `_. For example if a logged in user doesn't have permission to add new instances of the ``Author`` model from our previous example, it won't be listed in the types of pages that user can add when viewing the navigation tree in the admin. In conjunction with Django's permission system, the ``Page`` model also implements the methods ``can_add``, ``can_change`` and ``can_delete``. These methods provide a way for custom page types to implement their own permissions by being overridden on subclasses of the ``Page`` model. Each of these methods takes a single argument which is the current request object. This provides the ability to define custom permission methods with access to the current user as well. .. note:: The ``can_add`` permission in the context of an existing page has a different meaning than in the context of an overall model as is the case with Django's permission system. In the case of a page instance, ``can_add`` refers to the ability to add child pages. For example, if our ``Author`` content type should only contain one child page at most, and only be deletable when added as a child page (unless you're a superuser), the following permission methods could be implemented:: class Author(Page): dob = models.DateField("Date of birth") def can_add(self, request): return self.children.count() == 0 def can_delete(self, request): return request.user.is_superuser or self.parent is not None Page Menus ========== We've looked closely at the aspects of individual pages, now let's look at displaying all of the pages as a hierarchical menu. A typical site may contain several different page menus, for example a menu that shows primary pages on the header of the site, with secondary pages as drop-down lists. Another type of menu would be a full or partial tree in a side-bar on the site. The footer may display a menu with primary and secondary pages grouped together as vertical lists. Mezzanine provides the ``page_menu`` template tag for rendering the above types of page menus, or any other type you can think of. The ``page_menu`` template tag is responsible for rendering a single branch of the page tree at a time, and accepts two optional arguments (you'll usually need to supply at least one of them) in either order. The arguments are the name of a menu template to use for a single branch within the page tree, and the parent menu item for the branch that will be rendered. The page menu template will be provided with a variable ``page_branch``, which contains a list of pages for the current branch. We can then call the ``page_menu`` template tag for each page in the branch, using the page as the parent argument to render its children. When calling the ``page_menu`` template tag from within a menu template, we don't need to supply the template name again, as it can be inferred. Note that by omitting the parent page argument for the ``page_menu`` template tag, the first branch rendered will be all of the primary pages, that is, all of the pages without a parent. Here's a simple menu example using two template files, that renders the entire page tree using unordered list HTML tags:: {% load pages_tags %} {% page_menu "pages/menus/my_menu.html" %} {% load pages_tags %}
    {% for page in page_branch %}
  • {{ page.title }} {% page_menu page %}
    • {% endfor %}
The first file starts off the menu without specifying a parent page so that primary pages are first rendered, and only passes in the menu template to use. The second file is the actual menu template that includes itself recursively for each branch in the menu. We could even specify a different menu template in the call to ``page_menu`` in our menu template, if we wanted to use a different layout for child pages. Filtering Menus --------------- Each ``Page`` instance has a field ``in_menus`` which specifies which menus the page should appear in. In the admin interface, the ``in_menus`` field is a list of checkboxes for each of the menu templates. The menu choices for the ``in_menus`` field are defined by the ``PAGE_MENU_TEMPLATES`` setting, which is a sequence of menu templates. Each item in the sequence is a three item sequence, containing a unique ID for the template, a label for the template, and the template path. For example in your ``settings.py`` module:: PAGE_MENU_TEMPLATES = ( (1, "Top navigation bar", "pages/menus/dropdown.html"), (2, "Left-hand tree", "pages/menus/tree.html"), (3, "Footer", "pages/menus/footer.html"), ) The selections made for the ``in_menus`` field on each page don't actually filter a page from being included in the ``page_branch`` variable that contains the list of pages for the current branch. Instead it's used to set the value of ``page.in_menu`` for each page in the menu template, so it's up to your menu template to check the page's ``in_menu`` attribute explicitly, in order to exclude it:: {% load pages_tags %}
    {% for page in page_branch %} {% if page.in_menu %}
  • {{ page.title }} {% page_menu page %}
    • {% endif %} {% endfor %}
Note that if a menu template is not defined in the ``PAGE_MENU_TEMPLATES`` setting, the branch pages supplied to it will always have the ``in_menu`` attribute set to ``True``, so the only way this will be ``False`` is if the menu template has been added to ``PAGE_MENU_TEMPLATES``, and then *not* selected for a page in the admin interface. Menu Variables -------------- The ``page_menu`` template tag provides a handful of variables, both in the template context, and assigned to each page in the branch, for helping you to build advanced menus. * ``page_branch`` - a list of pages for the current branch * ``on_home`` - a boolean for whether the homepage is being viewed * ``has_home`` - a boolean for whether a page object exists for the homepage, which is used to check whether a hard-coded link to the homepage should be used in the page menu * ``branch_level`` - an integer for the current branch depth * ``page_branch_in_menu`` - a boolean for whether this branch should be in the menu (see "filtering menus" below) * ``parent_page`` - a reference to the parent page * ``page.in_menu`` - a boolean for whether the branch page should be in the menu (see "filtering menus" below) * ``page.has_children`` - a boolean for whether the branch page has any child pages at all, disregarding the current menu * ``page.has_children_in_menu`` - a boolean for whether the branch page has any child pages that appear in the current menu * ``page.num_children`` - an integer for the number of child pages the branch page has in total, disregarding the current menu * ``page.num_children_in_menu`` - an integer for the number of child pages the branch page has, that also appear in the current menu * ``page.is_current_child`` - a boolean for whether the branch page is a child of the current page being viewed * ``page.is_current_sibling`` - a boolean for whether the branch page is a sibling (has the same parent) of the current page being viewed * ``page.is_current_parent`` - a boolean for whether the branch page is the direct parent of the current page being viewed. * ``page.is_current_or_ascendant`` - a boolean for whether the branch page is the current page being viewed, or an ascendant (parent, grand-parent, etc) of the current page being viewed * ``page.is_primary`` - a boolean for whether the branch page is a primary page (has no parent) * ``page.html_id`` - a unique string that can be used as the HTML ID attribute * ``page.branch_level`` - an integer for the branch page's depth Here's a commonly requested example of custom menu logic. Suppose you have primary navigation across the top of the site showing only primary pages, representing sections of the site. You then want to have a tree menu in a sidebar, that displays all pages within the section of the site currently being viewed. To achieve this we recursively move through the page tree, only drilling down through child pages if ``page.is_current_or_ascendant`` is ``True``, or if the page isn't a primary page. The key here is the ``page.is_current_or_ascendant`` check is only applied to the primary page, so all of its descendants end up being rendered. Finally, we also only display the link to each page if it isn't the primary page for the section:: {% load pages_tags %}
    {% for page in page_branch %} {% if page.in_menu %} {% if page.is_current_or_ascendant or not page.is_primary %}
  • {% if not page.is_primary %} {{ page.title }} {% endif %} {% page_menu page %}
    • {% endif %} {% endif %} {% endfor %}
Non-Page Content ================ Sometimes you might need to use regular Django applications within your site, that fall outside of Mezzanine's page structure. Mezzanine fully supports using regular Django applications. All you need to do is add the app's urlpatterns to your project's ``urls.py`` module. Mezzanine's blog application for example, does not use ``Page`` content types, and is just a regular Django app. Mezzanine provides some helpers for your Django apps to integrate more closely with Mezzanine. The ``Displayable`` Model ------------------------- The abstract model ``mezzanine.core.models.Displayable`` and associated manager ``mezzanine.core.managers.PublishedManager`` provide common features for items that can be displayed on the site with their own URLs (also known as slugs). Mezzanine's ``Page`` model subclasses it. Some of its features are: * Meta data such as a title, description and keywords. * Auto-generated slug from the title. * Draft/published status with the ability to preview drafts. * Pre-dated publishing. * Searchable by Mezzanine's :doc:`search-engine`. Models that do not inherit from the ``Page`` model described earlier should subclass the ``Displayable`` model if any of the above features are required. An example of this can be found in the ``mezzanine.blog`` application, where ``BlogPost`` instances contain their own URLs and views that fall outside of the regular URL/view structure of the ``Page`` model. Third-party App Integration --------------------------- A common requirement when using regular Django apps with Mezzanine is for pages in the site's navigation to point to the urlpatterns for the app. Implementing this simply requires creating a page with a URL used by the application. The template rendered by the application's view will have a ``page`` variable in its context, that contains the current page object that was created with the same URL.