Integrating django-cms into an existing project - Error: TemplateDoesNotExist at /news/cms_wizard/create/

Question

I am trying to add news functionality to an existing django project. I decided to use django-cms to provide the functionality. The documentation is lacking and what little there is, is next to useless, in terms of integrating django-cms into an existing project.

I have looked at this question and this one but the offered answers only take me so far.

What I want to do is to be able to have pages with static data, and use django-cms to allow users with the right permissions to create new pages and/or update existing pages.

At the moment, when I run python manage.py runserver and I navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/news/1/, I get the following error message:

NoReverseMatch at /news/1/ Reverse for 'pages-root' not found. 'pages-root' is not a valid view function or pattern name.

Here is the relevant versioning information for my software components:

Django                3.2.2  
django-classy-tags    2.0.0  
django-cms            3.8.0  
django-formtools      2.3    
django-sekizai        2.0.0  
django-treebeard      4.5.1  
djangocms-admin-style 2.0.2 

settings.py (relevant section)

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    'django.contrib.sites',
    'cms',
    'menus',
    'treebeard',

    'sekizai',

    'news',
]

SITE_ID = 1

SITE_ID = 1
X_FRAME_OPTIONS = "ALLOWALL"
XS_SHARING_ALLOWED_METHODS = ["POST", "GET", "OPTIONS", "PUT", "DELETE"]

MIDDLEWARE = [
    'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',

    'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
    'cms.middleware.user.CurrentUserMiddleware',
    'cms.middleware.page.CurrentPageMiddleware',
    'cms.middleware.toolbar.ToolbarMiddleware',
    'cms.middleware.language.LanguageCookieMiddleware',

]

LANGUAGES = [
    ('en', 'English'),
]

CMS_TEMPLATES = (
    ('template_1.html', 'Template One'),
    ('template_2.html', 'Template Two'),
)    

ROOT_URLCONF = 'blogproject.urls'

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',

                'sekizai.context_processors.sekizai',
                'cms.context_processors.cms_settings',
            ],
        },
    },
]

WSGI_APPLICATION = 'blogproject.wsgi.application'


# Database
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/settings/#databases

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3',
    }
}


# Password validation
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/settings/#auth-password-validators

AUTH_PASSWORD_VALIDATORS = [
    {
        'NAME': 'django.contrib.auth.password_validation.UserAttributeSimilarityValidator',
    },
    {
        'NAME': 'django.contrib.auth.password_validation.MinimumLengthValidator',
    },
    {
        'NAME': 'django.contrib.auth.password_validation.CommonPasswordValidator',
    },
    {
        'NAME': 'django.contrib.auth.password_validation.NumericPasswordValidator',
    },
]


# Internationalization
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/i18n/

LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'

# ...

myproj/myproj/urls.py

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    path('news/', include('news.urls')),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

news/urls.py

from django.urls import include, path
from . import views

#app_name = 'news'


urlpatterns = [
    path('<int:id>/', views.detail, name='detail'),
    path('', include('cms.urls')),
]

news/model.py

from django.db import models
from cms.models.fields import PlaceholderField

# Create your models here.

class NewsItem(models.Model):
    # your fields
    title = models.TextField()
    content = PlaceholderField('placeholder_name')

news/views.py

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, render

from .models import NewsItem


# Create your views here.
def detail(request, id):
    object = get_object_or_404(NewsItem, id=id)

    return render(request, 'news/detail.html', { 'object': object })

news/templates/news/detail.html

{% load cms_tags %}
{{ object.title }}
{% render_placeholder object.content language 'en' %}

output of news/templates

news/templates/
└── news
    ├── cms_wizard
    │   └── create
    │       └── template_1.html
    ├── detail.html
    └── template_1.html

I have two issues that I need help solving:

1. The page that is displayed when I go to http://127.0.0.1/news/ is not using my template for my website - rather it is using a template from django-cms. How do I change it to use my own template?

2. When I got to http://127.0.0.1/news/1 only my page title is shown - the editable widget is not displaced, and I can't enter text as expected. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

1. To solve the problem of finding a templates, you need to familiarize yourself with the method for finding templates. From the documentation:

Loads templates from Django apps on the filesystem. For each app in INSTALLED_APPS, the loader looks for a templates subdirectory. If the directory exists, Django looks for templates in there.

For example, for this setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = ['myproject.polls', 'myproject.music']

… Then get_template ('foo.html') will look for foo.html in these directories, in this order:

 / path / to / myproject / polls / templates /
 / path / to / myproject / music / templates /

... and will use the one it finds first.

From this we can conclude that it is necessary to put 'news' in INSTALLED_APPS before 'cms':

INSTALLED_APPS = [
     ...
    'news',
     ...
     'cms',
     ...
] 

2. Usually the text itself is displayed on the detail page, without the ability to change it. And they change it on the admin page:

    from django.contrib import admin
    from .news.model import NewsItem
   
    class NewsItemAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
         pass
   
    admin.site.register(NewsItem, NewsItemAdmin)
   

If you need to display a page for editing on your site, then you can use the forms.