# Aircox.CMS Simple CMS generator used in Aircox. Main features includes: - website configuration and templating - articles and static pages - sections: - embeddable views used to display related elements of an object - load dynamic personnalized data - posts related to external models: - attributes binding, automatically updated - personalization of view rendering, using templates or sections - integrated admin interface if desired - list and detail views + routing - positioned menus using views - comment We aims here to automatize most common tasks and to ease website configuration. # Dependencies * `django-taggit`: publications' tags; * `easy_thumbnails`: publications' images and previews; * `django-honeypot`: comments anti-spam Note: this application can be used outside aircox if needed. # Architecture A **Website** holds all required informations to run the server instance. It is used to register all kind of posts, routes to the views, menus, etc. Basically, for each type of publication, the user declare the corresponding model, the routes, the views used to render it, using `website.register`. ## Posts **Post** is the base model for a publication. **Article** is the provided model for articles and static pages. **RelatedPost** is used to generate posts related to a model, the corresponding bindings and so on. The idea is that you declare your own models using it as parent, and give informations for bindings and so on. This is as simple as: ```python class MyModelPost(RelatedPost): class Relation: model = MyModel bindings = { 'thread': 'parent_field_name', 'title': 'name' } ``` Note: it is possible to assign a function as a bounded value; in such case, the function will be called using arguments **(post, related_object)**. At rendering, the property *info* can be retrieved from the Post. It is however not a field. ### Combine multiple models It is possible to render views that combine multiple models, with some limitation. In order to make it possible, the `GenericModel` has been created with its own query__set class `QCombine`. It can be used to register views that must render list of different elements, such as for search. Once declared, you just need to register the class with a view to the website. ```python import aircox.cms.qcombine as qcombine class Article(RelatedPost): pass class Program(RelatedPost): pass class Diffusion(RelatedPost): pass class Publication(qcombine.GenericModel): models = [ Program, Diffusion, Article, ] # website.register(... model = Publication ...) # qs = Publication.objects.filter(title__icontain == "Hi") ``` ## Routes Routes are used to generate the URLs of the website. We provide some of the common routes: for the detail view of course, but also to select all posts or by thread, date, search, tags. It is of course possible to create your own routes. ## Sections Sections are used to render part of a publication, for example to render a playlist related to the diffusion of a program. If the rendering of a publication can vary depending the related element, in most of the cases when we render elements, we can find the same patterns: a picture, a text, a list of URLs/related posts/other items. In order to avoid to much code writing and the multiplication of template files (e.g. one for each type of publication), we prefer to declare these sections and configure them. This reduce the work, keep design coherent, and reduce the risk of bugs and so on. ## Exposure Section can expose one or more methods whose result are accessible from the web. Such function is called an *Exposure*, and return a *string*(!). The routes to the exposures are generated and registered at the same time a model is registered to the website, with the corresponding Section. To expose a method, there is to steps: * decorate the parent class with `aircox.cms.decorators.expose` * decorate the method with `aircox.cms.decorators.expose` An exposed method has an `_exposure` attribute, that is an instance of Exposure, that holds exposure's informations and offer some tools to work with exposure: ```python from aircox.cms.decorators import expose @expose class MySection(sections.Section): @expose hi(self, request, *args, **kwargs): return "hi!" @expose hello(self, request, name, *args, **kwargs): return "hello " + name hello._exposure.pattern = "(?P\w+)" ``` The urls will be generated once the class decorator is called, using for each exposed item the following values: - name: `'exps.' + class._exposure.name + '.' + method._exposure.name` - url pattern: `'exps/' + class._exposure.pattern + '/' + method._exposure.name` - kwargs: `{'cl': class }` Check also the javascript scripts where there are various utility to get the result of exposure and map them easily. ### Using templates It is possible to render using templates, by setting `_exposure.template_name`. In this case, the function is wrapped using `aircox.cms.decorators.template`, and have this signature: ```python function(class, request) -> dict ``` The returned dictionnary is used as context object to render the template. ## Website This class is used to create the website itself and regroup all the needed informations to make it beautiful. There are different steps to create the website, using instance of the Website class: 1. Create the Website instance with all basic information: name, tags, description, menus and so on. 2. Register the views: eventually linking with a model, a list of used sections, routes, and optional parameters. The given name is used for routing. 3. Register website's URLs to Django. 4. Change templates and css styles if needed. It also offers various facilities, such as comments view registering, menu initialization, url reversing. ### Default view and reverse The Website class offers a `reverse` function that can be used to reverse a url using a Route, a Post and kwargs arguments. It is possible to ask to reverse to a default route if the reversing process failed with the given model. In this case, it uses the registered views that have been registered as *default view* (register function with argument `as_default=True`). # Rendering ## Views They are three kind of views, among which two are used to render related content (`PostListView`, `PostDetailView`), and one is used to set arbitrary content at given url pattern (`PageView`). The `PostDetailView` and `PageView` use a list of sections to render their content. If there is only one section in the view, it is merged as the main content instead of being a block in the content; this has for consequence that the template's context are merged and rendering at the same time than the page instead of before. `PostListView` uses the route that have been matched in order to render the list. Internally, it uses `sections.List` to render the list, if no section is given by the user. The context used to render the page is initialized using the list's rendering context, then completed with its own context's stuff. ## Sections A Section behave similar to a view with few differences: * it renders its content to a string, using the function `render`; * the method `as_view` return an instance of the section rather than a function, in order to keep possible to access section's data; ## Menus `Menu` is a section containing others sections, and are used to render the website's menus. By default they are the ones of the parent website, but it is also possible to change the menus per view. It is possible to render only the content of a view without any menu, by adding the parameter `embed` in the request's url. This has been done in order to allow XMLHttpRequests proper. ## Lists Lists in `PostListView` and as a section in another view always uses the **list.html** template. It extends another template, that is configurable using `base_template` template argument; this has been used to render the list either in a section or as a page. It is also possible to specify a list of fields that are rendered in the list, at the list initialisation or using request parameter `fields` (in this case it must be a subset of the list.fields). # Rendered content ## Templates All sections and pages uses the **website.html** view to be rendered. If `context['embed']` is True, it only render the content without any menu. Previously there was two distinct templates, but in order to reduce the amount of code, keep coherence between the templates, they have been merged. The following blocks are available, with their related container (declared *inside* the block): * *title*: the optional title in a `

` tag; * *header*: the optional header in a `
` tag; * *content*: the content itself; by default there is no related container. By convention however, if there is a container it has the class `.content`; * *footer*: the footer in a `