Hello,

I'm converting a static website to a Django application and I need a piece
of advice from more experienced people what is the right way to store
content.
The website will have some static pages like "about","contacts", etc. and a
dynamic content like news and photo galleries that should be updated from
the web interface. So my best guess is that static pages should be
implemented using templates and news should be stored in a database. I
believe this is a common task so is there a better way to solve it? And how
is news editing implemented? Does the editor create an html in some
html-editor and then paste it into the database, or is a web-based
WYSIWYG-editor usually used?

Thank you!

I would advise you to take a look at feincms, it has exactly what you need.

I'm not sure that I fully understand your question, but, for the static
content, django flatpages
(https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/flatpages/) may be
what you are looking for.

News editing would have to be handled by your news editing app!
django-cms (https://www.django-cms.org/) may be a good first port of
call. There are WYSIWYG editors which can be easily integrated, eg
TinyMCE (http://django-tinymce.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html)

@jonas, @Paul Backhouse  thank you for your answers!

I thought about using CMS but considering this is my first project I would
like to do most of the work from scratch, that way I will have more control
over the result and will learn more in the process. TinyMCE looks like
something I had in mind, thanks for the link!

What I should have asked, is it okay to store all the site's html content
in a database? Is it usually done that way?

понедельник, 24 сентября 2012 г., 20:01:45 UTC+4 пользователь Paul
Backhouse написал:

I'm not sure what you mean by "all the site's html". You wouldn't have
_all_ the sites html in the database, django generates html dynamically
in response to requests, and (usually html) templates are used to
provide uniform structure around the context of a response. Templates
are not normally stored in a database, maybe because they're not
considered to be data which are likely to change, nor can be expressed
in a relational manner.

However it's not unreasonable to have some editable content stored in
the database, which may be html.

An example:

A site has an "About Us" page and the client wants to add in the fact
that Gerald has joined the company.

You could render a template that has all the "About Us" data hard coded,
but then to update the page you would have to edit the template, check
it into revision control and redeploy the site.

If you use flatpages (or any other CMS) then the site administrator (the
client) can change the "About Us" page content through the admin
interface, save it (to the database) and make sure it looks OK on the
site. Lovely.