Configuration

django CMS has a number of settings to configure its behaviour. These should be available in your settings.py file.

The INSTALLED_APPS setting

The ordering of items in INSTALLED_APPS matters. Entries for applications with plugins should come after cms.

Custom User Requirements

When using a custom user model (i.e. the AUTH_USER_MODEL Django setting), there are a few requirements that must be met.

DjangoCMS expects a user model with at minimum the following fields: email, password, is_active, is_staff, and is_superuser. Additionally, it should inherit from AbstractBaseUser and PermissionsMixin (or AbstractUser), and must define one field as the USERNAME_FIELD (see Django documentation for more details) and define a get_fullname() method.

The models must also be editable via django admin and have an admin class registered.

Additionally, the application in which the model is defined must be loaded before cms in INSTALLED_APPS.

Note

In most cases, it is better to create a UserProfile model with a one to one relationship to auth.User rather than creating a custom user model. Custom user models are only necessary if you intended to alter the default behaviour of the User model, not simply extend it.

Additionally, if you do intend to use a custom user model, it is generally advisable to do so only at the beginning of a project, before the database is created.

Required Settings

CMS_TEMPLATES

default

() (Not a valid setting!)

A list of templates you can select for a page.

Example:

CMS_TEMPLATES = (
    ('base.html', gettext('default')),
    ('2col.html', gettext('2 Column')),
    ('3col.html', gettext('3 Column')),
    ('extra.html', gettext('Some extra fancy template')),
)

Note

All templates defined in CMS_TEMPLATES must contain at least the js and css sekizai namespaces. For more information, see Static files handling with sekizai.

Note

Alternatively you can use CMS_TEMPLATES_DIR to define a directory containing templates for django CMS.

Warning

django CMS requires some special templates to function correctly. These are provided within cms/templates/cms. You are strongly advised not to use cms as a directory name for your own project templates.

Basic Customisation

CMS_TEMPLATE_INHERITANCE

default

True

Enables the inheritance of templates from parent pages.

When enabled, pages’ Template options will include a new default: Inherit from the parent page (unless the page is a root page).

CMS_TEMPLATES_DIR

default

None

Instead of explicitly providing a set of templates via CMS_TEMPLATES a directory can be provided using this configuration.

CMS_TEMPLATES_DIR can be set to the (absolute) path of the templates directory, or set to a dictionary with SITE_ID: template path items:

CMS_TEMPLATES_DIR: {
    1: '/absolute/path/for/site/1/',
    2: '/absolute/path/for/site/2/',
}

The provided directory is scanned and all templates in it are loaded as templates for django CMS.

Template loaded and their names can be customized using the templates dir as a python module, by creating a __init__.py file in the templates directory. The file contains a single TEMPLATES dictionary with the list of templates as keys and template names as values:::

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
TEMPLATES = {
    'col_two.html': _('Two columns'),
    'col_three.html': _('Three columns'),
}

Being a normal python file, templates labels can be passed through gettext for translation.

Note

As templates are still loaded by the Django template loader, the given directory must be reachable by the template loading system. Currently filesystem and app_directory loader schemas are tested and supported.

CMS_PLACEHOLDER_CONF

default

{}

Used to configure placeholders. If not given, all plugins will be available in all placeholders.

Example:

CMS_PLACEHOLDER_CONF = {
    'content': {
        'plugins': ['TextPlugin', 'PicturePlugin'],
        'text_only_plugins': ['LinkPlugin'],
        'extra_context': {"width":640},
        'name': gettext("Content"),
        'language_fallback': True,
        'default_plugins': [
            {
                'plugin_type': 'TextPlugin',
                'values': {
                    'body':'<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>',
                },
            },
        ],
        'child_classes': {
            'TextPlugin': ['PicturePlugin', 'LinkPlugin'],
        },
        'parent_classes': {
            'LinkPlugin': ['TextPlugin'],
        },
    },
    'right-column': {
        "plugins": ['TeaserPlugin', 'LinkPlugin'],
        "extra_context": {"width": 280},
        'name': gettext("Right Column"),
        'limits': {
            'global': 2,
            'TeaserPlugin': 1,
            'LinkPlugin': 1,
        },
        'plugin_modules': {
            'LinkPlugin': 'Extra',
        },
        'plugin_labels': {
            'LinkPlugin': 'Add a link',
        },
    },
    'base.html content': {
        "plugins": ['TextPlugin', 'PicturePlugin', 'TeaserPlugin'],
        'inherit': 'content',
    },
}

You can combine template names and placeholder names to granularly define plugins, as shown above with base.html content.

plugins

A list of plugins that can be added to this placeholder. If not supplied, all plugins can be selected.

text_only_plugins

A list of additional plugins available only in the TextPlugin, these plugins can’t be added directly to this placeholder.

extra_context

Extra context that plugins in this placeholder receive.

name

The name displayed in the Django admin. With the gettext stub, the name can be internationalized.

limits

Limit the number of plugins that can be placed inside this placeholder. Dictionary keys are plugin names and the values are their respective limits. Special case: global - Limit the absolute number of plugins in this placeholder regardless of type (takes precedence over the type-specific limits).

language_fallback

When True, if the placeholder has no plugin for the current language it falls back to the fallback languages as specified in CMS_LANGUAGES. Defaults to False to maintain pre-3.0 behaviour.

default_plugins

You can specify the list of default plugins which will be automagically added when the placeholder will be created (or rendered). Each element of the list is a dictionary with following keys :

• plugin_type

  The plugin type to add to the placeholder Example : ‘TextPlugin’

  values

  Dictionary to use for the plugin creation. It depends on the plugin_type. See the documentation of each plugin type to see which parameters are required and available. Example for a Textplugin: {‘body’:’<p>Lorem ipsum</p>’} Example for a LinkPlugin : {‘name’:’Django-CMS’,’url’:’https://www.django-cms.org‘}

  children

  It is a list of dictionnaries to configure default plugins to add as children for the current plugin (it must accepts children). Each dictionary accepts same args than dictionnaries of default_plugins : plugin_type, values, children (yes, it is recursive).

Complete example of default_plugins usage:

CMS_PLACEHOLDER_CONF = {
    'content': {
        'name' : _('Content'),
        'plugins': ['TextPlugin', 'LinkPlugin'],
        'default_plugins':[
            {
                'plugin_type':'TextPlugin',
                'values':{
                    'body':'<p>Great websites : %(_tag_child_1)s and %(_tag_child_2)s</p>'
                },
                'children':[
                    {
                        'plugin_type':'LinkPlugin',
                        'values':{
                            'name':'django',
                            'url':'https://www.djangoproject.com/'
                        },
                    },
                    {
                        'plugin_type':'LinkPlugin',
                        'values':{
                            'name':'django-cms',
                            'url':'https://www.django-cms.org'
                        },
                        # If using LinkPlugin from djangocms-link which
                        # accepts children, you could add some grandchildren :
                        # 'children' : [
                        #     ...
                        # ]
                    },
                ]
            },
        ]
    }
}

plugin_modules

A dictionary of plugins and custom module names to group plugin in the toolbar UI.

plugin_labels

A dictionary of plugins and custom labels to show in the toolbar UI.

child_classes

A dictionary of plugin names with lists describing which plugins may be placed inside each plugin. If not supplied, all plugins can be selected.

parent_classes

A dictionary of plugin names with lists describing which plugins may contain each plugin. If not supplied, all plugins can be selected.

require_parent

A boolean indication whether that plugin requires another plugin as parent or not.

inherit

Placeholder name or template name + placeholder name which inherit. In the example, the configuration for “base.html content” inherits from “content” and just overwrite the “plugins” setting to allow TeaserPlugin, thus you have not to duplicate your “content“‘s configuration.

CMS_PLUGIN_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS

default

[]

A list of plugin context processors. Plugin context processors are callables that modify all plugins’ context before rendering. See Custom Plugins for more information.

CMS_PLUGIN_PROCESSORS

default

[]

A list of plugin processors. Plugin processors are callables that modify all plugins’ output after rendering. See Custom Plugins for more information.

CMS_APPHOOKS

default:

()

A list of import paths for cms.app_base.CMSApp subclasses.

By default, apphooks are auto-discovered in applications listed in all INSTALLED_APPS, by trying to import their cms_app module.

When CMS_APPHOOKS is set, auto-discovery is disabled.

Example:

CMS_APPHOOKS = (
    'myapp.cms_app.MyApp',
    'otherapp.cms_app.MyFancyApp',
    'sampleapp.cms_app.SampleApp',
)

I18N and L10N

CMS_LANGUAGES

default

Value of LANGUAGES converted to this format

Defines the languages available in django CMS.

Example:

CMS_LANGUAGES = {
    1: [
        {
            'code': 'en',
            'name': gettext('English'),
            'fallbacks': ['de', 'fr'],
            'public': True,
            'hide_untranslated': True,
            'redirect_on_fallback':False,
        },
        {
            'code': 'de',
            'name': gettext('Deutsch'),
            'fallbacks': ['en', 'fr'],
            'public': True,
        },
        {
            'code': 'fr',
            'name': gettext('French'),
            'public': False,
        },
    ],
    2: [
        {
            'code': 'nl',
            'name': gettext('Dutch'),
            'public': True,
            'fallbacks': ['en'],
        },
    ],
    'default': {
        'fallbacks': ['en', 'de', 'fr'],
        'redirect_on_fallback':True,
        'public': True,
        'hide_untranslated': False,
    }
}

Note

Make sure you only define languages which are also in LANGUAGES.

Warning

Make sure you use language codes (en-us) and not locale names (en_US) here and in LANGUAGES. Use check command to check for correct syntax.

CMS_LANGUAGES has different options where you can define how different languages behave, with granular control.

On the first level you can set values for each SITE_ID. In the example above we define two sites. The first site has 3 languages (English, German and French) and the second site has only Dutch.

The default node defines default behaviour for all languages. You can overwrite the default settings with language-specific properties. For example we define hide_untranslated as False globally, but the English language overwrites this behaviour.

Every language node needs at least a code and a name property. code is the ISO 2 code for the language, and name is the verbose name of the language.

Note

With a gettext() lambda function you can make language names translatable. To enable this add gettext = lambda s: s at the beginning of your settings file.

What are the properties a language node can have?

code

String. RFC5646 code of the language.

example

"en".

Note

Is required for every language.

name

String. The verbose name of the language.

Note

Is required for every language.

public

Determines whether this language is accessible in the frontend. You may want for example to keep a language private until your content has been fully translated.

type

Boolean

default

True

fallbacks

A list of alternative languages, in order of preference, that are to be used if a page is not translated yet..

example

['de', 'fr']

default

[]

hide_untranslated

Hide untranslated pages in menus

type

Boolean

default

True

redirect_on_fallback

Determines behaviour when the preferred language is not available. If True, will redirect to the URL of the same page in the fallback language. If False, the content will be displayed in the fallback language, but there will be no redirect.

Note that this applies to the fallback behaviour of pages. Within pages, placeholders will not by default adopt the same behaviour. If you want a placeholder to follow a page’s fallback behaviour, you must set its language_fallback to True in CMS_PLACEHOLDER_CONF, above.

type

Boolean

default

True

Unicode support for automated slugs

django CMS supports automated slug generation from page titles that contain unicode characters via the unihandecode.js project. To enable support for unihandecode.js, at least CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST and CMS_UNIHANDECODE_VERSION must be set.

CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST

default

None

Must be set to the URL where you host your unihandecode.js files. For licensing reasons, django CMS does not include unihandecode.js.

If set to None, the default, unihandecode.js is not used.

Note

Unihandecode.js is a rather large library, especially when loading support for Japanese. It is therefore very important that you serve it from a server that supports gzip compression. Further, make sure that those files can be cached by the browser for a very long period.

CMS_UNIHANDECODE_VERSION

default

None

Must be set to the version number (eg '1.0.0') you want to use. Together with CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST this setting is used to build the full URLs for the javascript files. URLs are built like this: <CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST>-<CMS_UNIHANDECODE_VERSION>.<DECODER>.min.js.

CMS_UNIHANDECODE_DECODERS

default

['ja', 'zh', 'vn', 'kr', 'diacritic']

If you add additional decoders to your CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST, you can add them to this setting.

CMS_UNIHANDECODE_DEFAULT_DECODER

default

'diacritic'

The default decoder to use when unihandecode.js support is enabled, but the current language does not provide a specific decoder in CMS_UNIHANDECODE_DECODERS. If set to None, failing to find a specific decoder will disable unihandecode.js for this language.

Example

Add these to your project’s settings:

CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST = '/static/unihandecode/'
CMS_UNIHANDECODE_VERSION = '1.0.0'
CMS_UNIHANDECODE_DECODERS = ['ja', 'zh', 'vn', 'kr', 'diacritic']

Add the library files from GitHub ojii/unihandecode.js tree/dist to your static folder:

project/
    static/
        unihandecode/
            unihandecode-1.0.0.core.min.js
            unihandecode-1.0.0.diacritic.min.js
            unihandecode-1.0.0.ja.min.js
            unihandecode-1.0.0.kr.min.js
            unihandecode-1.0.0.vn.min.js
            unihandecode-1.0.0.zh.min.js

More documentation is available on unihandecode.js’ Read the Docs.

Media Settings

CMS_MEDIA_PATH

default

cms/

The path from MEDIA_ROOT to the media files located in cms/media/

CMS_MEDIA_ROOT

default

MEDIA_ROOT + CMS_MEDIA_PATH

The path to the media root of the cms media files.

CMS_UNESCAPED_RENDER_MODEL_TAGS

default

True

Warning

In this version of django CMS, this setting has a default value of True to provide behaviour consistent with previous releases. However, all developers are encouraged to set this value to False to help prevent a range of security vulnerabilities stemming from HTML, Javascript, and CSS Code Injection.

Important

This setting is deprecated and will be removed in a near-future release. Developers are encouraged to carefully consider the source of any content displayed by the render_model template tag and only add the optional template filter safe on model fields that are known to be cleansed of any malicious strings.

When this setting is removed, the render_model template tag will no longer automatically mark as “safe” their output. Any content that is intended to be displayed as rendered markup will require the safe filter applied when displaying with the render_model tag.

This setting affects how certain template tags display model-based content. In particular, the template tag: render_model.

CMS_MEDIA_URL

default

MEDIA_URL + CMS_MEDIA_PATH

The location of the media files that are located in cms/media/cms/

CMS_PAGE_MEDIA_PATH

default

'cms_page_media/'

By default, django CMS creates a folder called cms_page_media in your static files folder where all uploaded media files are stored. The media files are stored in subfolders numbered with the id of the page.

You need to ensure that the directory to which it points is writable by the user under which Django will be running.

URLs

Advanced Settings

CMS_PERMISSION

default

False

When enabled, 3 new models are provided in Admin:

• Pages global permissions
• User groups - page
• Users - page

In the edit-view of the pages you can now assign users to pages and grant them permissions. In the global permissions you can set the permissions for users globally.

If a user has the right to create new users he can now do so in the “Users - page”, but he will only see the users he created. The users he created can also only inherit the rights he has. So if he only has been granted the right to edit a certain page all users he creates can, in turn, only edit this page. Naturally he can limit the rights of the users he creates even further, allowing them to see only a subset of the pages to which he is allowed access.

CMS_RAW_ID_USERS

default

False

This setting only applies if CMS_PERMISSION is True

The view restrictions and page permissions inlines on the cms.models.Page admin change forms can cause performance problems where there are many thousands of users being put into simple select boxes. If set to a positive integer, this setting forces the inlines on that page to use standard Django admin raw ID widgets rather than select boxes if the number of users in the system is greater than that number, dramatically improving performance.

Note

Using raw ID fields in combination with limit_choices_to causes errors due to excessively long URLs if you have many thousands of users (the PKs are all included in the URL of the popup window). For this reason, we only apply this limit if the number of users is relatively small (fewer than 500). If the number of users we need to limit to is greater than that, we use the usual input field instead unless the user is a CMS superuser, in which case we bypass the limit. Unfortunately, this means that non-superusers won’t see any benefit from this setting.

CMS_PUBLIC_FOR

default

all

Determines whether pages without any view restrictions are public by default or staff only. Possible values are all and staff.

CMS_CACHE_DURATIONS

This dictionary carries the various cache duration settings.

'content'

default

60

Cache expiration (in seconds) for show_placeholder, page_url, placeholder and static_placeholder template tags.

Note

This settings was previously called CMS_CONTENT_CACHE_DURATION

'menus'

default

3600

Cache expiration (in seconds) for the menu tree.

Note

This settings was previously called MENU_CACHE_DURATION

'permissions'

default

3600

Cache expiration (in seconds) for view and other permissions.

CMS_CACHE_PREFIX

default

cms-

The CMS will prepend the value associated with this key to every cache access (set and get). This is useful when you have several django CMS installations, and you don’t want them to share cache objects.

Example:

CMS_CACHE_PREFIX = 'mysite-live'

Note

Django 1.3 introduced a site-wide cache key prefix. See Django’s own docs on cache key prefixing

CMS_PAGE_CACHE

default

True

Should the output of pages be cached? Takes the language, and timezone into account. Pages for logged in users are not cached. If the toolbar is visible the page is not cached as well.

CMS_PLACEHOLDER_CACHE

default

True

Should the output of the various placeholder template tags be cached? Takes the current language and timezone into account. If the toolbar is in edit mode or a plugin with cache=False is present the placeholders will not be cached.

CMS_PLUGIN_CACHE

default

True

Default value of the cache attribute of plugins. Should plugins be cached by default if not set explicitly?

Warning

If you disable the plugin cache be sure to restart the server and clear the cache afterwards.

CMS_MAX_PAGE_HISTORY_REVERSIONS

default

15

Configures how many undo steps are saved in the db excluding publish steps. In the page admin there is a History button to revert to previous version of a page. In the past, databases using django-reversion could grow huge. To help address this issue, only a limited number of edit revisions will now be saved.

This setting declares how many edit revisions are saved in the database. By default the newest 15 edit revisions are kept.

CMS_MAX_PAGE_PUBLISH_REVERSIONS

default

10

If django-reversion is installed everything you do with a page and all plugin changes will be saved in a revision.

In the page admin there is a History button to revert to previous version of a page. In the past, databases using django-reversion could grow huge. To help address this issue, only a limited number of published revisions will now be saved.

This setting declares how many published revisions are saved in the database. By default the newest 10 published revisions are kept; all others are deleted when you publish a page.

If set to 0 all published revisions are kept, but you will need to ensure that the revision table does not grow excessively large.

CMS_TOOLBARS

default

None

If defined, specifies the list of toolbar modifiers to be used to populate the toolbar as import paths. Otherwise, all available toolbars from both the CMS and the 3rd party apps will be loaded.

Example:

CMS_TOOLBARS = [
    # CMS Toolbars
    'cms.cms_toolbar.PlaceholderToolbar',
    'cms.cms_toolbar.BasicToolbar',
    'cms.cms_toolbar.PageToolbar',
    # 3rd Party Toolbar
    'aldryn_blog.cms_toolbar.BlogToolbar',
]

CMS_DEFAULT_X_FRAME_OPTIONS

default

Page.X_FRAME_OPTIONS_INHERIT

This setting is the default value for a Page’s X Frame Options setting. This should be an integer preferably taken from the Page object e.g.

• X_FRAME_OPTIONS_INHERIT
• X_FRAME_OPTIONS_ALLOW
• X_FRAME_OPTIONS_SAMEORIGIN
• X_FRAME_OPTIONS_DENY