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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:41:43+00:00

I’m writing a simple CMS based on Django. Most content management systems rely on

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I’m writing a simple CMS based on Django. Most content management systems rely on having a fixed page, on a fixed URL, using a template that has one or many editable regions. To have an editable region, you require a Page. For the system to work out which page, you require the URL.

The problem comes when you’re no longer dealing with “pages” (be those FlatPages pages, or something else), but rather instances from another Model. For example if I have a Model of products, I may wish to create a detail page that has multiple editable regions within.

I could build those regions into the Model but in my case, there are several Models and is a lot of variance in how much data I want to show.

Therefore, I want to build the CMS at template level and specify what a block (an editable region) is based on the instance of “page” or the model it uses.

I’ve had the idea that perhaps I could dump custom template tags on the page like this:

{% block unique_object "unique placeholder name" %}

And that would find a “block” based on the two arguments passed in. An example:

<h1>{{ product_instance.name }}</h1>
{% block product_instance "detail: product short description" %}
{% block product_instance "detail: product video" %}
{% block product_instance "detail: product long description" %}

Sounds spiffy, right? Well the problem I’m running into is how do I create a “key” for a zone so I can pull the correct block out? I’ll be dealing with a completely unknown object (it could be a “page” object, a URL, a model instance, anything – it could even be a boat</fg>).

Other Django micro-applications must do this. You can tag anything with django-tagging, right? I’ve tried to understand how that works but I’m drawing blanks.

So, firstly, am I mad? And assuming I not, and this looks like a relatively sane idea to persue, how should I go about linking an object+string to a block/editable-region?

Note: Editing will be done on-the-page so there’s no real issue in letting the users edit the zones. I won’t have to do any reverse-mumbo-jumbo in the admin. My eventual dream is to allow a third argument to specify what sort of content area this is (text, image, video, etc). If you have any comments on any of this, I’m happy to read them!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    django-tagging uses Django’s contenttypes framework. The docs do a much better job of explaining it than I can, but the simplest description of it would be “generic foreign key that can point to any other model.”

    This may be what you are looking for, but from your description it also sounds like you want to do something very similar to some other existing projects:

    • django-flatblocks (“… acts like django.contrib.flatpages but for parts of a page; like an editable help box you want show alongside the main content.”)

    • django-better-chunks (“Think of it as flatpages for small bits of reusable content you might want to insert into your templates and manage from the admin interface.”)

    and so on. If these are similar then they’ll make a good starting point for you.

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