3.5.0 release notes

This release of django CMS concentrates on usability and user-experience, by improving its responsiveness while performing editing operations, particularly those that involve updates to plugin trees.

It also continues our move to decouple logical layers in the system. Most significant in this release is the new separation of the structure board from page rendering, which allows the structure board to be updated without requiring the page to be re-rendered. This vastly speeds up page editing, especially when dealing with complex plugin structures.

Another significant example is that the Page model has been decoupled from the site navigation hierarchy. The navigation tree now exists independently, offering further speed advantages, as well as future benefits for development and extensibility.

Our work to improve separation of concerns can also be seen in the renaming of publishing controls, so that they no longer refer to specifically to pages. Ultimately, publishing actions could apply to any kind of content, and this is a step in that direction.

What’s new in 3.5.0

Improvements and new features

  • structure board now decoupled from page rendering
  • Page model decoupled from the site navigation
  • Page copy between sites
  • better behaviour of the language chooser for published/unpublished languages
  • improved handling, refactored code for language fallbacks
  • improved repr for Page, Title, Placeholder and CMSPlugin models
  • generic publishing controls no longer refer to “page”
  • improved documentation

Bug Fixes

This release fixes:

  • a Page template settings permission issue (failed to check for “Change advanced settings permission”)
  • a bug allowing Pages to be pasted without the correct translations for the target site
  • a bug that prevented users from seeing the welcome screen when debug is off
  • a bug allowing aliased plugins to render even if their host page was unpublished
  • a bug where focusing inputs in modal would require two clicks in some browsers
  • minor issues with initialisation of interface widgets.
  • minor clipboard bugs

Removal of deprecated functionality

Previously deprecated functionality has been removed:

  • Menu modules can no longer be named menus.py (use cms_menus.py).
  • The cms.utils.django_load.py module has been removed (in favour of standard Django helpers)
  • Support for Django Reversion has been removed.
  • The urls and menus attributes are no longer supported on CMSApp (apphook) classes. All apphook subclasses now need a get_urls() method. In addition, if your apphook has a menus attribute, that will need to be replaced by a get_menus() method.
  • Page.revision_id has been removed
  • Deprecated content creation wizard settings have been removed.

Backward-incompatible changes

  • The home page is no longer automatically the root page in the tree (since there is no longer a page tree). Instead, the home page is set manually in the page list admin.
  • Previously, ordered pages could be obtained via Page.object.order_by('path'); the equivalent is now Page.object.order_by('node__path').
  • Pages are no longer ordered by path. For ordering, use order_by('node__path').
  • Pages no longer have a site field. Whereas previously you could use filter(site=id), now use filter(node__site==id).
  • Pages no longer have a parent field. Instead a parent property now returns the new parent_page attribute, which relies on the node tree.
  • Never-published pages can no longer have a ‘pending’ publishing state. A data migration, cms/migrations/0018_pagenode.py, removes this.
  • Using self.request.path or self.request.path_info in a CMSToolbar subclass method is no longer reliable and is discouraged. Instead, use self.toolbar.request_path.

How to upgrade to 3.5

We assume you are upgrading from django CMS 3.4.

Please make sure that your current database is consistent and in a healthy state, and make a copy of the database before proceeding further.

Then run:

  1. python manage.py migrate  # to ensure that your database is up-to-date with migrations
  2. python manage.py cms fix-tree

Check custom code and third-party applications for use of deprecated or removed functionality or APIs (see above). Some third-party components may need to be updated.

Install the new version of django CMS from GitHub.

Run:

  1. python manage.py migrate

to apply the new migrations.

Create a new django CMS 3.5 project

On the Divio Cloud

The Divio Cloud offers an easy way to set up django CMS projects. In the Divio Cloud Control Panel, create a new django CMS project and Deploy it.

Using the django CMS Installer

See our installation guide in the tutorial. However, make sure that you:

  • have installed the latest version of django CMS Installer (at least version 0.9.8)
  • specify the version to install as develop: djangocms --cms-version=develop mysite

The user name and password will both be admin.

Contributors to this release

  • Alexander Paramonov
  • Andras Gyömrey
  • Daniele Procida
  • Gianluca Guarini
  • Iacopo Spalletti
  • Jacob Rief
  • Jens Diemer
  • Júlio R. Lucchese
  • Leon Smith
  • Ludwig Hähne
  • Mark Walker
  • Nicolas PASCAL
  • Nina Zakharenko
  • Paulo Alvarado
  • Robert Stein
  • Salmanul Farzy
  • Sergey Fedoseev
  • Shaun Brady
  • Stefan Foulis
  • Tim Graham
  • Vadim Sikora
  • alskgj