3. Customizing the Simple CMS

This is part 3 of a series of posts on James Bennett's excellent Practical Django Projects. The table of contents and explanation can be found here.

Improving the Search Function with Keywords

On page 34 when defining your first model class, remove the Admin class to replace it with new a separate newforms admin file (hereafter just admin). If I've ignored code that works just fine I just use ... to show this.

class SearchKeyword(models.Model):
...
   #REMOVE THIS
   class Admin:
      pass

Instead of the basic class Admin you create an admin.py file in the search folder. The simplest possible admin configuration is:

from django.contrib import admin
from cms.search.models import SearchKeyword

admin.site.register(SearchKeyword)

Registering the SearchKeyword allows it to be autodiscovered and included on the admin site. On p36 the SearchKeyword model admin is improved. Firstly remove core = True, the admin now uses a checkbox instead so this is not used any more. Then create an admin.py in the cms folder.

from django.contrib import admin

from cms.search.models import SearchKeyword
from django.contrib.flatpages.models import FlatPage
from django.contrib.flatpages.admin import FlatPageAdmin

class SearchKeywordInline(admin.StackedInline):
    model = SearchKeyword
    max_num = 3
    extra = 1

class MyFlatPageAdmin(FlatPageAdmin):
    inlines = [
    SearchKeywordInline,
    ]

admin.site.unregister(FlatPage)
admin.site.register(FlatPage, MyFlatPageAdmin)

The custom MyFlatPageAdmin inherits and adds the inline SearchKeyword form. To register your custom FlatPage admin you need to unregister the original first. Finally you can delete the search.admin.py file if you only want the inline form.

Caution - Improperly Configured Admin

While writing this post I got myself in a knot when I got this error:

ImproperlyConfigured at /admin/
Error while importing URLconf 'cms.urls': 'type' object is not iterable

Clearly this unhelpful error message is causing all sorts of grief as people migrate code to the new admin classes, but I'm sure relief won't be too far off. For the purposes of learning it's actually not to difficult to resolve once you know what you're meant to be looking for.

The first step to resolving the Improperly Configured error would be to comment out your admin.autodiscover() in urls.py. If the error goes away (though admin won't function correctly) then it's an admin class causing the problem. Uncomment it again then basically find the misbehaving admin class by commenting out the admin.site.register(FooAdminClass) functions in each admin.py until you find the one that is misbehaving.

As it was I had tried to register the SearchKeywordInline StackedInline admin class in it's own right instead of just leaving it as part of the custom FlatPagesAdmin class.

All done with the basics of the new admin? Have a read of this blog post and screencast from oebfare on migrating to the newforms admin.