Question

I’m using Django to create a site that provides a separate web UI for sorts of producers and consumers. Both UIs (or “subsites”) have different layouts, menus and graphics. However they access the same database and models, just from different aspects (producer vs. consumer…).It’s all hosted under a single domain, the UI differentiation is done with URLs.

The problem comes when I want to integrate a CMS to this system, to take care of the menu structures and textual content. How should I go about handling the two different menus for the different UIs? I took a look at django-cms and django-page-cms, and they seem to maintain only a single menu hierarchy.

Any ideas?

One dirtyish solution would be to add e.g. a different prefix for each UI’s menu items in the CMS, and hack the CMS code so that it only inserts the menu items for the correct UI (given as a parameter to the show_menu template tag).

A nicer way would be if it was possible to have multiple instances of the CMS app, so that each of them had their own database tables as well. But is this possible with django and e.g. django-cms or django-page-cms?

Some further restrictions:

• the CMS must support localization
• I’d prefer running a single Django instance, to keep the configuration and testing simple

Answer 1

I have not used django-cms so this is just off the top of my head.

There’s a section of the docs called Extending the menu that looked promising. It may be unfortunate that so much of their configuration is in settings.py because it looks like you could manipulate their CMS_TEMPLATES to use different base templates (etc.) for different users. One way of getting around this (assuming that there is not a more direct route) is to add something to the UserProfile that identifies a user as consumer/producer. Then in your base.html you do:

{% if user.get_profile.consumer %}
 ...
{% else %}
 ...
{% endif %}

This effectively gives you two entirely different look/feel options based on user type. I’ll also note that {% extends %} can take either a string constant or a string variable, so you could use a context_processor to set the name of template you are extending.