Installation

Install the latest stable release

$ pip install djangocms-cascade

or the current development release from github

$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/jrief/djangocms-cascade.git#egg=djangocms-cascade

Dependencies

Create a database schema

./manage.py migrate cmsplugin_cascade

Install Bootstrap

Since the Bootstrap CSS and JavaScript files are part of their own repository, they are not shipped within this package. Furthermore, as they are not part of the PyPI network, they have to be installed through another package manager, namely bower.

cd djangocms-cascade
bower install --require

Alternatively copy the installed bower_components into a directory of your project or to any other meaningful location, but ensure that the directory bower_components can be found by your StaticFileFinder. In doubt, add that directory to your STATICFILES_DIRS:

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.abspath(os.path.join(MY_PROJECT_DIR, 'bower_components')),
)

Configuration

Add 'cmsplugin_cascade' to the list of INSTALLED_APPS in the project’s settings.py file. Optionally add ‘cmsplugin_cascade.extra_fields’ and/or ‘cmsplugin_cascade.sharable’ to the list of INSTALLED_APPS. Make sure that these entries are located before the entry cms.

Configure the CMS plugin

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'cmsplugin_cascade',
    'cmsplugin_cascade.extra_fields',  # optional
    'cmsplugin_cascade.sharable',  # optional
    'cms',
    ...
)

Activate the plugins

By default, no djangocms-cascade plugins is activated. Activate them in the project’s settings.py with the directive CMSPLUGIN_CASCADE_PLUGINS.

To activate all available Bootstrap plugins, use:

CMSPLUGIN_CASCADE_PLUGINS = ('cmsplugin_cascade.bootstrap3',)

If for some reason, only a subset of the available Bootstrap plugins shall be activated, name each of them. If for example only the grid system shall be used, but no other Bootstrap plugins, then configure:

CMSPLUGIN_CASCADE_PLUGINS = ('cmsplugin_cascade.bootstrap3.container',)

A useful generic plugin is the Link-plugin. It replaces the djangocms-link-plugin, normally used together with the CMS.

CMSPLUGIN_CASCADE_PLUGINS += ('cmsplugin_cascade.link',)

Restrict plugins to a particular placeholder

This setting is optional, but strongly recommended. It exclusively restricts the plugin BootstrapContainerPlugin to the placeholder Page Content (see below)

CMS_PLACEHOLDER_CONF = {
    'Page Content': {
        'plugins': ['BootstrapContainerPlugin'],
    },
}

If this setting is omitted, then one can add any plugin to the named placeholder, which normally is undesired, because it can break the page’s grid.

Define the leaf plugins

Leaf plugins are those, which contain real data, say text or images. Hence the default setting is to allow the TextPlugin and the FilerImagePlugin as leafs. This can be overridden using the configuration directive

CMSPLUGIN_CASCADE = {
    ...
    'alien_plugins': ('TextPlugin', 'FilerImagePlugin', 'OtherLeafPlugin',),
    ...
}

Bootstrap 3 with AngularJS

Some Bootstrap3 plugins can be rendered using templates which are suitable for the very popular Angular UI Bootstrap framework. This can be done during runtime; when editing the plugin a select box appears which allows to chose an alternative template for rendering.

Template Customization

Make sure that the style sheets are referenced correctly by the used templates. DjangoCMS requires Django-Sekizai to organize these includes, so a strong recommendation is to use that Django app.

The templates used for a DjangoCMS project shall include a header, footer and the menu bar, but should leave out an empty working area. When using HTML5, wrap this area into an <article> or <section> element. This placeholder shall be named using a meaningless identifier, for instance “Page Content” or similar:

<section>{% placeholder "Page Content" %}</section>

From now on, the page layout can be adopted inside this placeholder, without having to fiddle with template coding anymore.