Apphooks

Right now, our django Polls app is statically hooked into the project’s urls.py. This is allright, but we can do more, by attaching applications to django CMS pages.

We do this with an Apphook, created using a CMSApp subclass, which tells the CMS how to include that app.

Apphooks live in a file called cms_app.py, so create one in your Poll application.

This is the most basic example for a django CMS app:

from cms.app_base import CMSApp
from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
class PollsApp(CMSApp):
    name = _("Poll App")  # give your app a name, this is required
    urls = ["polls.urls"]  # link your app to url configuration(s)
apphook_pool.register(PollsApp)  # register your app

You’ll need to restart the runserver to allow the new apphook to become available.

In the admin, create a new child page of the Home page. In its Advanced settings, choose “Polls App” from the Application menu, and Save.

Refresh the page, and you’ll find that the Polls application is now available directly from the new django CMS page. (Apphooks won’t take effect until the server has restarted, though this is not generally an issue on the runserver, which can handle this automatically.)

You can now remove the inclusion of the polls urls in your project’s urls.py - it’s no longer required there.

Next, we’re going to install a django-CMS-compatible third-party application.