Introduction#

Philosophy#

feincms3 follows the library-not-framework approach. Inversion of control is avoided as much as possible, and great care is taken to provide useful functionality which can still be easily replaced if anyone wishes to do so.

Replacing functionality should not require using extension points or configuration but simply different glue code, which should be short and obvious enough to be repeated in different projects.

The idea is not necessarily to avoid code, but to avoid all sorts of complexity, whether obvious or not. The cost of abstractions is that there always comes a moment where you have understand the layers beneath, and often the learning curve gets steep quickly.

feincms3 is your Do It Yourself kit for CMS building, as Django is your Do It Yourself kit for website building.

feincms3 only has abstract model classes and mixins. Any concrete classes (for example, the page model) have to be added by you in your own project. This is by design, and paves the way for introducing local customizations without having to rely on hooks, extension points and whatnot.

Standing on the shoulders#

Django’s builtin admin application provides a really good and usable administration interface for managing structured content. django-content-editor extends Django’s inlines mechanism with tools and an interface for managing heterogenous collections of content as are often necessary for content management systems. For example, articles may be composed of text blocks with images and videos interspersed throughout. Those content elements are called plugins.

django-tree-queries provides a smart way to efficiently fetch tree-shaped data in a relational database supporting Common Table Expressions.

Historical note

What we are calling plugins is called a content type in FeinCMS. This can be easily confused with Django’s own contenttypes, therefore the name was changed for feincms3.

Using django-mptt or other tree libraries is possible with feincms3 as well if you don’t want to use CTEs. Reimplementing the abstract page class with a different library should be straightforward.

The parts of feincms3#

feincms3 has the following main parts:

  • A base class for your own pages model if you want to use django-tree-queries to build a hierarchical page tree.

  • Model mixins for common tasks such as building several navigation menus from a page tree, multilingual sites and selectable templates.

  • A few ready-made plugins for rich text, images, oEmbed and template snippets.

  • A HTML sanitization and cleansing function and a rich text widget building on html-sanitizer and django-ckeditor.

  • Facilities for embedding apps through the admin interface, such as any interactive content (forms) or apps with subpages (e.g. an articles app).

  • A renderer and associated helpers and template tags.

  • admin classes for visualizing and modifying the tree hierarchy.

  • Various utilities (shortcuts and template tags).