The new ENB website

One of our latest projects to go live is a new website for the English National Ballet. Part of a major rebrand, we completely replaced their old PHP site with a new content-managed site powered by Django CMS.

Django CMS is very flexible, largely due to its minimalistic approach. It provides no page templates out of the box, so you can construct your HTML from the ground up. This is great if you want to make a CMS with a really strong design, because there is very little interference from the framework. However, its minimalistic approach also means that you sometimes have to write extra code to tie all the content together.

A good example of this is content types. In Django CMS, there is only one content type: Page. It has certain fields associated with it e.g. title, slug, published. Any other information that appears on a page comes courtesy of plugins. The default Django CMS plugins give you everything you need to add arbitrary text, images and video to a page. But what if you want more fields for your page? Let’s say, for example, you are representing a ballet production and you want category, thumbnail and summary text fields, which don’t appear on the page itself but are needed for listings elsewhere on the site?

We decided to create a special “metadata” plugin to be added to the production pages, that would only be visible to content editors and not end users. This was seen as the best solution that achieved our goal while maintaining a decent user experience for the editors.

The plugin model looks something like this:

class ProductionDetails(CMSPlugin):
    summary = models.CharField(max_length=200) # Short summary, shown in listings
    image = FilerImageField() # Thumbnail image, shown in listings
    audiences = models.ManyToManyField(Audience) # Categorisation

Note the use of django-filer for the image field. This is simply the best add-on I have encountered for dealing with image uploads and the inevitable cropping and resizing of said images. You can also use cmsplugin-filer (by the same author) to replace the standard image plugin that comes with Django CMS.

Now querying the database for, say, the first 10 productions for a family audience (audience id 3) is as simple as:

ProductionDetails.objects.filter(audiences=3, placeholder__page__published=True)[:10]

So now we have a plugin model that we can query, and we don’t need a template as we don’t want it to appear on the actual page, right? Wrong. We still want to provide a good user experience for the editors, and this includes looking at a page in edit mode and being able to tell whether the page already has the plugin or not. So we use request.toolbar.edit_mode in the template to decide whether to render the plugin:

{% load thumbnail %}

{% if request.toolbar.edit_mode %}
<div id="production-details">
 <img src="{% thumbnail instance.image 100x100 crop upscale subject_location=instance.image.subject_location %}" />
 <p>Summary: {{ instance.summary }}</p>
 <p>Audiences: {{ instance.audiences.all|join:', ' }}</p>
</div>
{% endif %}

Now this information will only appear if an editor has activated the inline editing mode while looking at the page. If they look at the page and the information is missing, they know they need to add the plugin!

This solution works quite well for us, although it is still fairly easy to create a page and forget to give it any metadata. Ideally it would be mandatory to add a metadata plugin. Perhaps the subject of a future blog post!