Custom 404 and 500 pages

[Peter Farrell]

Hi All,

I have a customer that needed to be able to customize their 404 and 500 pages for their multi-language DjangoCMS site. Using the CMS seems like an obvious solution since we couldn't use a static page, however being able to actually set it up was a pain. I was able to come up with the following, however it seems like this would be a common customization.

urls.py:

handler404 = 'shared.views.page_not_found'

shared/views.py:

from cms.views import details
from django.http import HttpResponse

def page_not_found(request, exception):

    response = details(request, '404')

    # The cache framework incorrectly caches this page if you directly state the 404 status on the response then serving 200 sequent requests.

    # This should work but does not:

    #  response.status_code = 404
    #  return response.render()

   # The workaround is get the rendered content from the CMS and put it in a new HttpResponse

    return HttpResponse(content=response.rendered_content, content_type='text/html; charset=utf-8', status=404)

Two things:

1) Not sure why the Django cache framework and DjangoCMS caches the page when setting the 404 directly (as shown in the comments above). I cannot find in the response.render where the status_code gets clobbered back to 200.  However clearly if I grab the content (not the headers or statuscode) and return that in a new HttpResponse with the correct status code -- it works. I've tried no_cache decorators, etc.

2) Should there be something better baked into DjangoCMS to catch / handle Django handler events for 404 / 500 / others? I feel the answer is yes however I'm open to suggestions on a different approach than the one I'm using.

[Jacob Rief]

Two things:

1) Not sure why the Django cache framework and DjangoCMS caches the page when setting the 404 directly (as shown in the comments above). I cannot find in the response.render where the status_code gets clobbered back to 200.  However clearly if I grab the content (not the headers or statuscode) and return that in a new HttpResponse with the correct status code -- it works. I've tried no_cache decorators, etc.

2) Should there be something better baked into DjangoCMS to catch / handle Django handler events for 404 / 500 / others? I feel the answer is yes however I'm open to suggestions on a different approach than the one I'm using.

Error pages typically are not served by the CMS, therefore django-CMS doesn't offer any special page inside its menu tree.

What you can do however, is to create a custom model using a PlaceholderField. Then create a view serving your error pages.

Inside the template used by that error-response view, refer to that model object using the given placeholder.

These are the advantages of that approach:

1. You don't need to abuse any page from the tree in django-CMS. Error messages are separated from normal content.
2. This allows your client to use the structure mode for editing the placeholder's content.
3. By adding fields language and status_code to that model, you can customize what is rendered on any occasion in any language.

This btw. is an interesting use case and writing a reusable app for that purpose would make a lot of sense.

[Peter Farrell]

I've never thought about using a Placeholder field for this purpose. Thanks for the suggestion... I might have a crack at a reusable app this coming week.

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