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django-flatblocks

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django-flatblocks is a simple application for handling small text-blocks on websites. Think about it like django.contrib.flatpages just not for a whole page but for only parts of it, like an information text describing what you can do on a site.

Installation

Probably the easiest way to install this application is to first run pip install django-flatblocks. Once this step is complete add "flatblocks" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting in your settings.py file and run python manage.py syncdb to update your database.

Upgrading

django-flatblocks uses South for handling data and schema migrations starting with version 0.6.0, so the South-typical update path applies here.

If you're upgrading from a 0.5.x version or earlier you will have to migrate in 3 steps:

  1. Install south.

  2. Migrate your database to the first version of flatblocks using South:

    ./manage.py migrate flatblocks 0001 --fake

  3. Then migrate your database to the latest version of flatblocks' database and data structure:

    ./manage.py migrate flatblocks

Usage

Once you've created some instances of the flatblocks.models.FlatBlock model, you can load it it using the flatblocks templatetag-library:

{% load flatblocks %}

<html>
    <head>
        <!-- ... -->
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="page">
            <div id="main">
                <!-- ... -->
            </div>
            <div id="sidebar">
                {% flatblock "page.info" %}
            </div>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

This way you can display a text block with the name 'page.info'. If you have the name of a block in a template variable, leave out the quotes.

Additionally you can also specify which template should be used to render the flatblock:

{% flatblock "page.info" using="my_template.html" %}
<!-- -->
{% flatblock "page.about" using="my_template.html" %}

If you want to simply output the value of the content field of a flatblock without using any template, you can use either options:

{% flatblock "page.info" using=False %}

or

{% plain_flatblock "page.info" %}

As with the slug of the flatblock also with the template name you have the choice of using the literal name of the template or pass it to the templatetag as a variable.

The content of a flatblock (as well as its header) can also be evaluated as a full-fledged Django template:

{% flatblock "page.info" evaluated=True %}

This also works with the other parameters like the custom template and with the plain_flatblock templatetag:

{% flatblock "page.info" evaluated=True using="my_template.html" %}
<!-- -->
{% plain_flatblock "page.about" evaluated=True %}

edit-view

With flatblocks.views.edit django-flatblocks offers a simple view to edit your flatblocks from your frontend. To use it simply include it in your URLconf and create a flatblocks/edit.html template.

By default the view doesn't do any permission checking, so you should decorate it accordingly in your URLconf:

from flatblocks.views import edit
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

# ...

urlpatterns = pattern('',
    url(r'^flatblocks/(?P<pk>\d+)/edit/$', login_required(edit),
        name='flatblocks-edit'),
    # ...
    )

The template can operate on following variables:

  • form
  • flatblock
  • origin (the URL of the previous page)

Additionally the view offers some basic customization hooks via these keyword arguments:

template_name
Name of the template to be used for rendering this view. By default flatblocks/edit.html is used.
success_url
After successfully editing a flatblock the view will redirect the user to the URL specified here. By default the view will try to determine the last visited page before entering the edit-view (which is normally a page where the flatblock is used) and redirect the user back there.
modelform_class
If you want to use a customized ModelForm class for flatblocks you can specify it here.
permission_check

This argument lets you specify a callback function to do some flatblock-specific permission checking. Such a function could look like this:

def my_permcheck(request, flatblock):
    if request.user.is_staff or flatblock.slug == 'free_for_all':
        return True
    return HttpResponseRedirect('/')

With this permission callback set, a user that is not a staff-user is not allowed to edit this view unless it's the "free_for_all" block. If these criteria are not met, the user is redirected to the root URL of the page.

The contract here is pretty simple. The permission callback should return False, if the user should receive a 403 message when trying to edit this link. If the function returns an instance of HttpResponse the view will proceed from the assumption that your view already did everything there is to do and return that response-object. Any other return value tells the view that the permissions are OK for the current user and that it should proceed.

History

Since this application targets use-cases that are basically applicable to most web-projects out there, there are tons of solutions similar to this one. In fact, this app is a fork originally from django-chunks developed by Clint Ecker.

In November 2008 Kevin Fricovsky created the original fork in order to add an additional "active"-flag to each chunk. That project was later on forked by Peter Baumgardner who removed that flag again and added a "header"-field in order to directly associate and optional title with each text block.

This fork aims now to add more features like variable chunks and also integrate some of the features developed by H. Waara and S. Cranford in the django-better-chunks fork (django.contrib.site- and i18n-support).