I am about to develop multiple sites for different real estate companies. All share the same html, sections, etc. The difference is in the content, specially the properties... But some of those properties can be shared among the rest of the companies.
I am thinking in sharing the same database and differentiate content using the url. In this way I can use only one project instead of one for each company.
Does anyone have recommendations for this kind of projects?
Thanks,
I have done that.
Was it a good idea? Yes, in my case it was. I had to reuse the same content and when we changed the content, it had to be changed on all pages. On a simple site, a triple deploy and changing the content in three different projects is kind of overkill. But whereas it works fine in a simple front-end page (that hardly even requires Django), I do not recommend it for "real" web apps.
What will break? Think about the things that your pages will share and see if it's a problem.
1) I'm guessing that if you'll want to have user login capability on the page (besides the admin login), then that's a problem, if I can use the same user for different companies that have no apparent connection whatsoever. You could be in for a lot of trouble if the companies find out that user private details aren't as private as they thought. And the same goes for the users who really don't have a clue how they ended up with a user account on a page they've never visited.
2) URLs. You can't have different ones for each company without some extra hacking. If one of the companies wants to have /about/ and the other one /company/ page, you're gonna start hacking a bad solution that will blow up in your face when the companies ask for the next page.
3) Anything else you might want to have on your page that is connected to hardcoded data or database values. I.e. social authentication etc.
What can you do about it?
If I was hellbound on solving the first one, here's what I would do:
- Override the user model and add info about the registering page
- Create custom managers for user model for each page
- Write a middleware that only lets you use the page-specific manager for the current request
All in all, I wouldn't do it in a million years. Way too hacky, way too vulnerable. Just create separate databases.
For solving the second one, you can create a multi-host middleware that checks from which domain the request comes from and returns the correct URL config. Sth similar to this . It's not really hard to rewrite and modify to your needs.
It's impossible to decide for you, but I've given you something to think about before going one way or the other. Good luck!
Related
I'm new to working with Django and am developing for a client who wants to be able to change page content in the Django Admin. They need to be able to change the html of the index page without editing the files on the server.
I know about flatfiles but I'm not sure that's completely what I'm after as I can't display stuff such as Django forms for example.
EDIT: Kind of like how a CMS works but without the users/group stuff and be able to use Django View modules such as forms.
Any advice?
Thanks
Honestly, the scope of what you're looking for is too huge to cover in this format. There's a number of ways this could be done, but they're all going to require some work and customization based on the client's needs.
Flatpages could work if you allow HTML content and make sure the content is rendered as "safe" in the template. This really only covers the "content" area of the site, though. It wouldn't be wise to use flatpages for an entire site template, including header, sidebar, footer, etc.
You could create editable areas. So, you actually create models for things like headers, sidebars, footers, and modules within those areas, and then just pull them into the template as needed. Then, the client is only editing pieces of the template instead of responsible for the whole HTML document.
Forms are going to be a challenge, because they require backend-processing that requires a connected view. The client won't be able to just arbitrarily drop in some form code and have a form. But, you could use a third-party service form forms and just embed them in the available content regions. Or, there's a couple of django apps that try to implement a type of "form builder" in the admin. That might somehow let the client add a form via something like the shortcodes used in Wordpress, but you'd likely have to lay down some infrastructure to make that work.
At a certain point, stuff like this reaches a point of diminishing returns, though. The only way to allow total customization of the template is to drop down into the actual physical file and make changes there. You can make certain things easier for the client, but ultimately, they either need to scale back their customization needs or deal with the fact that they'll have to work with the filesystem.
I don't believe that is possible at this time. Of course you can edit your models but templates, I think not.
I would find out how much they need to change? If they plan a complete redesign every week then you're still looking for an answer. If they just need a dynamic front page then you can split it up into variables and let them edit sections of html. Much safer and less prone to breaking the html.
I have a question regarding the internationalization of a website's URL addresses.
The question is how to make it properly?
What I would like to do is something like this.
Assume you have an URL in your address bar
www.mydomain.com/en/book
then if you type www.mydomain.com/de/book you will be redirected to a german version of a site so the url will change to www.mydomain.com/de/buch and so on.
Idea:
I thought about making a table that would be used as a dictionary between different languages. For the website content I would still use i18n, but I think that for urls it cannot be applied.
The implementation:
I thought about modifying routing.py in a way that before any connection is invoked I would recognize in the URL a language that user wants, and store it in a session variable for later use with i18n. Then I would redirect user to a correct url for this lanugage and invoke a poper controller/action.
Any ideas, suggestions or recomendations are welcome.
Edit (2011-04-04 18:35):
I have just reminded myself that I have already encountered a similar problem on Opera Blog;
there is a problem on StackOverflow: Pylons application Internationalization, but it deals solely on site internationalization, no problem with URLs included;
WZeberaFFS has pointed our a small issue that may arise if no reference or previous language settings are taken into account;
Additional question: What should be stored in database, to make it work fast? I have my own idea, but I will give it a try later on.
I believe your implementation will work as log as you don't have the same name of to different pages like if you have a page called www.mydomain.com/en/music and if music in German is book, then the problem will be that if you want to go to www.mydomain.com/fr/music then you don't know if you are coming form /de/ or /en/. But this is only a problem if you have colliding names on different pages cross languish it will still work if you have the same name for a word in 2 different languish you wont really know where they cam form but you will know where they are heading.
If you have that problem then you have to save a session or hope that the client sends a referral.
I have no idea how it could be done in Python, but usually people do such things through some kind of URL Re-writer or URL filter - something that will consume your URL and re-direct to proper page setting Locale at the same time.
I'm new to Django and I'm working on the public website for a small company.
I'm facing an issue that I guess has already been encountered by lots a django noobs,
but I can't manage to find a good solution.
My problem is that there some informations (contact address, office phone number, company description...) that I use in nearly all of my views and are by nature unique (undertand: a database table with only 1 row). I currently store these informations has a model in my databse, but I find it a bit weird issue an additional database request each time (each view)
I need to access them. However, I need my client to be able to edit these informations (by the admin interface).
So, please, is there a django idiom to handle such an use case ?
Thx in advance.
If you look into caching solutions, they will probably do what you need.
The general queryset caching solution I use in johnny-cache, but for what you need, you can probably just load it up from the db and store it in the cache.
What you want to do is use select_related('contact_profile','office_data') etc when you query the items in your view, and in the admin, instead of registering all the data separately just use the InlineAdmin class for the Admin site and you will be able to edit all the information as if it was a single entity.
Check out the django docs for more information.
I would like to create a single page in the admin site of django where I can change some global variables of the website (title of the website, items in the navigation menu, etc). At the moment I have them coded as context processors but I would like to make them editable. Something similar to what happens in WordPress.
Is this possible?
I can store the data in the databse, but can I have a link in the admin site that goes straight to the first document record and doesnt allow the creation of multiple records (they wouldnt make sense)
Instead of creating a model in the database, would it be possible to change some context_processor from the admin site (I think this would be best)
django-preferences does exactly what you are looking for. The implementation is a bit hacky (particularly the setting of __module__ on the model class to trick Django into thinking it was loaded from a different app), but it works.
This sounds like what the sites framework is intended to help with.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/contrib/sites/
"It’s a hook for associating objects and functionality to particular Web sites, and it’s a holding place for the domain names and “verbose” names of your Django-powered sites."
The docs make it sound like it's only good for multiple sites, but it's a great place to put stuff in a single-site-per-django model too.
There's an app called django-values that allows you storing of specific settings in the database.
I know python and have just read a basic intro of django. I have to built something like a travel website with real time updates. Will django be sufficent for this? Somebody advised me to look at django-CMS, I couldn't find a very beginner's tutorial there. Should I opt for django-CMS? Also how much of django should i know before i can try out django-cms?
Edit: Not too much real time stuff but just updates on the fly, like availibilty etc. Do i really need CMS?
Thanks
From your brief description it sounds like the main part of you project will be something that manages travel information and displays it to visitors to a website. This definitely sounds like something Django would be perfect for.
Django projects tend to be very modular, so the content management part of you code would likely be completely distinct from the travel parts of your project. Personally I'd start with the core travel functionality, rather than start out with worrying about content management. Then once you have that in place you'll be better positioned to decide whether django-cms fits your content needs, or whether something hand rolled will do.
Start by defining your models for the travel application. Then register those models with the admin. Get happy with how the data is modelled and then try and create one of the basic views. You should have something up and running pretty quickly.
You might also be interested in the GeoDjango project http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/GeoDjango which provides lots of geographical and mapping tools - which sounds pretty relevant to your project.
I would say no. Django CMS is well designed, if you change content frequently. It has nice features to build up a page. But that means it only shows its benefits, when you create a lot pages/subpages and so on.
For a simple website that only presents data, without adding new pages/views, Django will suffice.
And from my experience, you should at lest be familiar with Views and URLs in order to use Django CMS well. But the same applies to Django itself. Everything else can be found on google.
Hope that helps.