Use Cascade outside of the CMS

One of the most legitimate points djangocms-cascade can be criticised for, is the lack of static content rendering. Specially in projects, where we want to work with static pages instead of CMS pages, one might fall back to handcrafting HTML, giving up all the benefits of rapid prototyping as provided by the Cascade plugin system.

Since version 0.14 of djangocms-cascade, one can prototype the page content and export it as JSON file using The CMS Clipboard. Later on, one can reuse that persisted data and create the same content outside of a CMS page. This is specially useful, if you must persist the page content in the project’s version control system.

Usage

After the placeholder of a CMS page, is filled up with plugins from djangocms-cascade, switch into Structure Mode, go to the context menu of that placeholder and click Copy all.

Next, inside Django’s administration backend, go to

Home › Django CMS Cascade › Persited Clipboard Content

and click onto Add Persisted Clipboard Content. The Data field will now be filled with a cascade of plugins serialized as JSON data. Copy that data and paste it into a file locatable by Django’s static file finders, for example myproject/static/myapp/cascades/slug.json.

In Templates

Create a Django template, where instead of adding a Django-CMS placeholder, use the templatetag render_cascade. Example:

{% load cascade_tags %}

{% render_cascade "myapp/cascades/slug.json" %}

This templatetag now renders the content just as if it would be rendered by the CMS. This means that changing the template of a djangocms-cascade plugin, immediately has effect on the rendered output. This is so to say Model View Control, where the Model is the content peristed as JSON, and the View is the template provided by the plugin. It separates the composition of HTML components from their actual representation, allowing a much better division of work during the page creation.

Caveats when creating your own Plugins

When developing your own plugins, consider the following precautions:

Invoking super

Instead of invoking super(MyPlugin, self).some_method() use self.super(MyPlugin, self).some_method(). This is required because djangocms-cascade creates a list of “shadow” plugins, which do not inherit from CMSPluginBase.

Templatetag render_plugin

Django-CMS provides a templatetag render_plugin. Don’t use it in templates provided by djangocms-cascade plugins. Instead use the templatetag named render_plugin from Cascade. Example:

{% load cascade_tags %}
<div class="some-css-class">
{% for plugin in instance.child_plugin_instances %}
    {% render_plugin plugin %}
{% endfor %}
<div>

Caching

Even though rendering using this templatetag is slightly faster than the classic placeholder tag provided by the CMS (because we don’t hit the database for each plugin instance), combining each plugin template with its context also takes its time. Therefore plugins rendered by render_cascade, by default are cached as well, just as their CMS counterparts.

This caching is disabled for plugins containing the attribute cache = False. It can be turned off globally using the directive CMSPLUGIN_CASCADE['cache_strides'] = True in the project’s settings.py.