Django comes with an optional “flatpages” application. It lets you store simple “flat” HTML content in a database and handles the management for you via Django’s admin interface and a Python API.
A flatpage is a simple object with a URL, title and content. Use it for one-off, special-case pages, such as “About” or “Privacy Policy” pages, that you want to store in a database but for which you don’t want to develop a custom Django application.
A flatpage can use a custom template or a default, systemwide flatpage template. It can be associated with one, or multiple, sites.
The content field may optionally be left blank if you prefer to put your content in a custom template.
Here are some examples of flatpages on Django-powered sites:
To install the flatpages app, follow these steps:
Install the sites framework
by adding
'django.contrib.sites'
to your INSTALLED_APPS
setting,
if it’s not already in there.
Also make sure you’ve correctly set SITE_ID
to the ID of the
site the settings file represents. This will usually be 1
(i.e.
SITE_ID = 1
, but if you’re using the sites framework to manage
multiple sites, it could be the ID of a different site.
Add 'django.contrib.flatpages'
to your INSTALLED_APPS
setting.
Add 'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware'
to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES
setting.
Run the command manage.py syncdb
.
manage.py syncdb
creates two tables in your database: django_flatpage
and django_flatpage_sites
. django_flatpage
is a simple lookup table
that simply maps a URL to a title and bunch of text content.
django_flatpage_sites
associates a flatpage with a site.
The FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
does all of the work.
FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
¶Each time any Django application raises a 404 error, this middleware
checks the flatpages database for the requested URL as a last resort.
Specifically, it checks for a flatpage with the given URL with a site ID
that corresponds to the SITE_ID
setting.
If it finds a match, it follows this algorithm:
flatpages/default.html
.flatpage
,
which is the flatpage object. It uses
RequestContext
in rendering the
template.APPEND_SLASH
setting) if the resulting URL refers to
a valid flatpage. Previously requesting a non-existent flatpage
would redirect to the same URL with an apppended slash first and
subsequently raise a 404.CommonMiddleware
.If it doesn’t find a match, the request continues to be processed as usual.
The middleware only gets activated for 404s – not for 500s or responses of any other status code.
Flatpages will not apply view middleware
Because the FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
is applied only after
URL resolution has failed and produced a 404, the response it
returns will not apply any view middleware
methods. Only requests which are successfully routed to a view via
normal URL resolution apply view middleware.
Note that the order of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES
matters. Generally, you
can put
FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
at the
end of the list. This means it will run first when processing the response, and
ensures that any other response-processing middlewares see the real flatpage
response rather than the 404.
For more on middleware, read the middleware docs.
Ensure that your 404 template works
Note that the
FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
only steps in once another view has successfully produced a 404 response.
If another view or middleware class attempts to produce a 404 but ends up
raising an exception instead (such as a TemplateDoesNotExist
exception if your site does not have an appropriate template to
use for HTTP 404 responses), the response will become an HTTP 500
(“Internal Server Error”) and the
FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
will not attempt to serve a flat page.
If you’ve activated the automatic Django admin interface, you should see a “Flatpages” section on the admin index page. Edit flatpages as you edit any other object in the system.
FlatPage
¶Flatpages are represented by a standard Django model, which lives in django/contrib/flatpages/models.py. You can access flatpage objects via the Django database API.
Check for duplicate flatpage URLs.
If you add or modify flatpages via your own code, you will likely want to
check for duplicate flatpage URLs within the same site. The flatpage form
used in the admin performs this validation check, and can be imported from
django.contrib.flatpages.forms.FlatPageForm
and used in your own
views.
By default, flatpages are rendered via the template
flatpages/default.html
, but you can override that for a
particular flatpage: in the admin, a collapsed fieldset titled
“Advanced options” (clicking will expand it) contains a field for
specifying a template name. If you’re creating a flat page via the
Python API you can simply set the template name as the field
template_name
on the FlatPage
object.
Creating the flatpages/default.html
template is your responsibility;
in your template directory, just create a flatpages
directory
containing a file default.html
.
Flatpage templates are passed a single context variable, flatpage
,
which is the flatpage object.
Here’s a sample flatpages/default.html
template:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>{{ flatpage.title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
{{ flatpage.content }}
</body>
</html>
Since you’re already entering raw HTML into the admin page for a flatpage,
both flatpage.title
and flatpage.content
are marked as not
requiring automatic HTML escaping in the
template.
FlatPage
objects in your templates¶The flatpages app provides a template tag that allows you to iterate over all of the available flatpages on the current site.
Like all custom template tags, you’ll need to load its custom
tag library before you can use
it. After loading the library, you can retrieve all current flatpages
via the get_flatpages
tag:
{% load flatpages %}
{% get_flatpages as flatpages %}
<ul>
{% for page in flatpages %}
<li><a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
registration_required
flatpages¶By default, the get_flatpages
templatetag will only show
flatpages that are marked registration_required = False
. If you
want to display registration-protected flatpages, you need to specify
an authenticated user using a``for`` clause.
For example:
{% get_flatpages for someuser as about_pages %}
If you provide an anonymous user, get_flatpages
will behave
the same as if you hadn’t provided a user – i.e., it will only show you
public flatpages.
An optional argument, starts_with
, can be applied to limit the
returned pages to those beginning with a particular base URL. This
argument may be passed as a string, or as a variable to be resolved
from the context.
For example:
{% get_flatpages '/about/' as about_pages %}
{% get_flatpages about_prefix as about_pages %}
{% get_flatpages '/about/' for someuser as about_pages %}
Jul 07, 2017