Extending the Toolbar

django CMS allows you to control what appears in the toolbar. This allows you to integrate your application in the frontend editing mode of django CMS and provide your users with a streamlined editing experience.

Registering Toolbar items

There are two ways to control what gets shown in the toolbar.

One is the CMS_TOOLBARS setting. This gives you full control over which classes are loaded, but requires that you specify them all manually.

The other is to provide cms_toolbar.py files in your apps, which will be automatically loaded as long CMS_TOOLBARS is not set (or set to None). We’ll work with this second method.

Create a new cms_toolbar.py file in your Polls application (NOTE: not in the Polls Plugin application we were working with in the previous tutorial):

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from cms.toolbar_pool import toolbar_pool
from cms.toolbar_base import CMSToolbar
@toolbar_pool.register
class PollToolbar(CMSToolbar):
    def populate(self):
        if self.is_current_app:
            menu = self.toolbar.get_or_create_menu('poll-app', _('Polls'))
            url = reverse('admin:polls_poll_changelist')
            menu.add_sideframe_item(_('Poll overview'), url=url)

What we’re doing above is this:

• defining a CMSToolbar subclass
• registering the toolbar class with @toolbar_pool.register
• defining a populate() method that adds an item to the menu

The populate() method:

• checks whether we’re in a page belonging to this application
• if so, it creates a menu item if one’s not already there
• works out the URL for this menu item
• tells it that it should open in the admin sideframe

Your cms_toolbar.py file should contain classes that extend cms.toolbar_base.CMSToolbar and are registered using cms.toolbar_pool.toolbar_pool.register(). The register function can be used as a decorator.

A CMSToolbar subclass needs four attributes:

• toolbar: the toolbar object
• request the current request
• is_current_app a flag indicating whether the current request is handled by the same app as the function is in
• app_path the name of the app used for the current request

CMSToolbar subclasses must implement a populate method. The populate method will only be called if the current user is a staff user.

There’s a lot more to django CMS toolbar classes than this - see Extending the Toolbar for more.