Extensible FeinCMS content article for Django

This is an extensible FeinCMS content article system for Django, designed to provide a simple Article model that is extensible.

What is an Article? Many things! You can use it as a news section, as a knowledge base, as a catalogue of pdfs, or pretty much anything else you can make it fit with.

Installation and setup

Firstly, get the package:

pip install feincms-articles

You will then need to add articles to your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    'articles',
)

Before proceeding with manage.py syncdb, you will need to create some content types and you may want to add some article extensions. By default the articles module has a basic set of content fields such as title, summary and content.

Registering ContentTypes

The Article model extends from the FeinCMS Base model, so you need to create some FeinCMS content types to add to your Articles. No types are created by default, because there is no way to unregister them. A sane default might be to create MediaFileContent and RichTextContent models; you can do this by adding the following lines somewhere into your project, for example at the bottom of a models.py file that will be processed anyway:

from feincms.content.richtext.models import RichTextContent
from feincms.content.medialibrary import MediaFileContent

from articles.models import Article

Article.register_regions(('top', _('Top content')), ('main', _('Main region')),)

Article.create_content_type(RichTextContent)
Article.create_content_type(MediaFileContent, POSITION_CHOICES=(('block', _('block')), ('left', _('left')), ('right', _('right')),))

Extensions

Extensions are a way to add often-used functionality the Article model. The extensions are standard python modules with a register() method which will be called upon registering the extension. The register() method receives the Article class itself and the model admin class ArticleAdmin as arguments.

The extensions can be activated by adding the following to a the bottom of a models.py file that will be processed anyway:

from articles.models import Article

Article.register_extensions(
    'articles.modules.category.extensions.category',
    'feincms.module.extensions.datepublisher',
    'articles.extensions.tags',
    'articles.extensions.thumbnail',
)

Articles comes with a number of bundled extensions, or you can use the generic FeinCMS extensions.

Creating your own extensions

To add an extension create a python module that defines a register function that accepts the Article class and the ArticleAdmin class as arguments and modifies them as required.

Here is the tags extension (similar to articles/extensions/tags.py):

def register(cls, admin_cls):
    cls.add_to_class('tags', TaggableManager(verbose_name=_('tags'), blank=True))

    cls.urlpatterns += patterns('taggit.views',
        url(r'^tags/(?P<slug>[^/]+)/$', 'tagged_object_list', {'queryset': cls.objects.active}, name="article_tagged_list"),
    )

    if admin_cls:
        if admin_cls.fieldsets:
            admin_cls.fieldsets[0][1]['fields'].append('tags')

Hooking up articles into your application

You have two main options here, depending on your use case. FeinCMS articles can be deployed using Application content, hooking up the URLconf articles.urls.

Alternatively you can just use content types to display a list of articles on a page. There is a bundled content type articles.content.ArticleList which will render a fixed number of articles.

If you’re not using the FeinCMS page module, the urls and views within articles are safe to use without ApplicationContent.

The category module also comes with content types for a list of articles belonging to a certain category (articles.modules.category.content.ArticleCategoryList) and the list of articles belonging to a set of categories (articles.modules.category.content.ArticleList).

There is also a template tag article_tags.articles, which will render a list of articles. It takes a optional parameters for limit (the number of articles) and the variable to insert the articles list into the context as.

Indices and tables