custom views within Djangocms?

Question

I haven't found a satisfactory way of doing this: I have a djangocms setup that is working fine. But I need to add content from a table outside the CMS to my homepage and render that content on the template. I can do this, but editing the urls.py within CMS to use my views like so...

url(r'^', 'myapp.views.slideshow_info'),

... excludes any content from CMS. I understand that I just get my custom views to accommodate what CMS' views is doing, but how do I achieve this?

at the moment my app's views says:

from myapp.models import model1, model2

def slideshow_info(request):
    return render_to_response('index.html', {'slideshow_list' : model1.objects.all()})

Many thanks

Answer 1

You can hook a custom app instance to any Django-CMS page. Here's the documentation on how to do so: http://docs.django-cms.org/en/2.1.3/extending_cms/app_integration.html#app-hooks You shouldn't need to alter the base url patterns to specifically re-route / to your view.

Before custom app-hooks were available, I would accomplish what you're trying to do with template tags.

Hope that helps you out.

Followup

Ok, in a recently completed site, I had to hook an app titled "portfolio" to display images on the home page of a Django-CMS site.

Here are the relevant portions of the code:

#portfolio/cms_app.py
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from cms.app_base import CMSApp
from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool

class PortfolioAppHook(CMSApp):
    name = _('Portfolio')
    urls = ['portfolio.urls']

apphook_pool.register(PortfolioAppHook)


#portfolio/urls.py
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

urlpatterns = patterns('portfolio.views',
    url(r'^(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$', 'project_detail', name='project_detail'),
    url(r'^$', 'portfolio_index', name='portfolio_index'),
)

#portfolio/views.py
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, render

from portfolio.models import Project


def portfolio_index(request):
    project_objects = Project.for_public if request.user.is_anonymous() \
        else Project.objects
    projects = project_objects.all().select_related(depth=1)
    return render('portfolio/index.html',
        {'projects' : projects}, request)


def project_detail(request, slug):
    project = get_object_or_404(Project, slug=slug)
    if not project.public and request.user.is_anonymous():
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/?login=true')
    return render('portfolio/project_detail.html',
        {'project' : project}, request)

#urls.py (base urls)
from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.contrib import admin

from views import login_user, logout_user

admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/filebrowser/', include('filebrowser.urls')),
    (r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    (r'^tinymce/', include('tinymce.urls')),
    url(r'^login/$', login_user, name='login_user'),
    url(r'^logout/$', logout_user, name='logout_user'),
    (r'^', include('sorl.thumbnail.urls')),
    (r'^', include('cms.urls')),
)

if settings.SERVE_STATIC_MEDIA:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        (r'^' + settings.MEDIA_URL.lstrip('/'), include('appmedia.urls')),
    ) + urlpatterns

As you can see from this working example, I haven't altered my base URLs to accommodate the home page view, rather I've provided the URLs for my Portfolio app to Django-CMS through cms_app.py

Hope that gets you going.