Installation

django CMS blog assumes a completely setup and working django CMS project. See django CMS installation docs for reference.

If you are not familiar with django CMS you are strongly encouraged to read django CMS documentation before installing django CMS blog, as setting it up and adding blog content require to use django CMS features which are not described in this documentation.

django CMS docs:

django-app-enabler support

django-app-enabler is supported.

You can either

  • Installation & configuration: python -mapp_enabler install djangocms-blog
  • Autoconfiguration: python -mapp_enabler enable djangocms_blog

You can further customise the blog configuration, you can start by checking:

Installation steps

Note

The steps in this section are applied automatically by django-app-enabler, if you use it.

  • Install djangocms-blog:

    pip install djangocms-blog

  • Add djangocms_blog and its dependencies to INSTALLED_APPS:

    INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'filer',
    'easy_thumbnails',
    'aldryn_apphooks_config',
    'parler',
    'taggit',
    'taggit_autosuggest',
    'meta',
    'sortedm2m',
    'djangocms_blog',
    ...
]

Note

The following are minimal defaults to get the blog running; they may not be suited for your deployment.

  • Add the following settings to your project:

    THUMBNAIL_PROCESSORS = (
    'easy_thumbnails.processors.colorspace',
    'easy_thumbnails.processors.autocrop',
    'filer.thumbnail_processors.scale_and_crop_with_subject_location',
    'easy_thumbnails.processors.filters',
)
META_SITE_PROTOCOL = 'https'  # set 'http' for non ssl enabled websites
META_USE_SITES = True

  • For meta tags support enable the needed types:

    META_USE_OG_PROPERTIES=True
META_USE_TWITTER_PROPERTIES=True
META_USE_GOOGLEPLUS_PROPERTIES=True # django-meta 1.x+
META_USE_SCHEMAORG_PROPERTIES=True  # django-meta 2.x+

  • Configure parler according to your languages:

    PARLER_LANGUAGES = {
    1: (
        {'code': 'en',},
        {'code': 'it',},
        {'code': 'fr',},
    ),
    'default': {
        'fallbacks': ['en', 'it', 'fr'],
    }
}

    Note

    Since parler 1.6 this can be skipped if the language configuration is the same as CMS_LANGUAGES.

  • Add the following to your urls.py:

    url(r'^taggit_autosuggest/', include('taggit_autosuggest.urls')),

  • Apply the migrations:

    python manage.py migrate

  • Add the blog application (see Attach the blog to a page below).

Modify templates

For standard djangocms-blog templates to work to must ensure a content block is available in the django CMS template used by the page djangocms-blog is attached to.

For example, in case the page use the base.html template, you must ensure that something like the following is in the template:

...
{% block content %}
    {% placeholder "page_content" %}
{% endblock content %}
...

Alternative you can override then djangocms_blog/base.html and extend a different block

...
{% block my_block %}
<div class="app app-blog">
    {% block content_blog %}{% endblock %}
</div>
{% endblock my_block %}
...

Enable haystack support

If you want to enable haystack support:

  • install djangocms-blog with:

    pip install djangocms-blog[search]

  • add aldryn_search to INSTALLED_APPS

  • configure haystack according to aldryn-search docs and haystack docs.

  • if not using aldryn_search, you can define your own search_indexes.py by skipping aldryn_search installation and writing your index for blog posts by following haystack documentation.

Attach the blog to a page

  • To start your blog you need to use AppHooks from django CMS to add the blog to a django CMS page; this step is not required when using Auto setup:

    • Create a new django CMS page
    • Go to Advanced settings and select Blog from the Application selector and create an Application configuration;
    • Eventually customise the Application instance name;
    • Publish the page
    • Restart the project instance to properly load blog urls.

    Check the Attaching blog to the home page section to attach the blog on the website home page.

Warning

After adding the apphook to the page you cannot change the Instance Namespace field for the defined AppHokConfig; if you want to change it, create a new one with the correct namespace, go in the CMS page Advanced settings and switch to the new Application configuration

  • Add and edit blog by creating them in the admin or using the toolbar, and the use the django CMS frontend editor. to edit the blog content:
    • Create a new blog entry in django admin backend or from the toolbar
    • Click on “view on site” button to view the post detail page
    • Edit the post via djangocms frontend by adding / editing plugins
    • Publish the blog post by flagging the “Publish” switch in the blog post admin

Note

by default djangocms-blog uses django CMS plugins for content, this means you will not have a text field in the blog post admin, but you will have to visit the frontend blog page (hit “Visit on site” button on the upper right corner) and add django CMS plugins on the frontend. Check the tutorial for more details.

Further configuration

As django CMS heavily relies on external applications to provide its features, you may also want to check the documentation of external packages.

Please, refer to each application documentation on details.

Auto setup

djangocms_blog can install and configue itself if it does not find any attached instance of itself. This feature is enable by default and will create:

  • a BlogConfig with default values
  • a Blog CMS page and will attach djangocms_blog instance to it
  • a home page if no home is found.

All the items will be created in every language configured for the website and the pages will be published. If not using aldryn-apphook-reload or django CMS 3.2 auto-reload middleware you are required to reload the project instance after this. This will only work for the current website as detected by Site.objects.get_current().

The auto setup is execute once for each server start but it will skip any action if a BlogConfig instance is found.