Orderable snippets?

[Lev Kanter]

Hi,

does Wagtail provide a mechanism to make Snippets orderable in the admin (using a similar UI to what's used to reorder pages)?

I realize snippets aren't necessarily intended to be orderable, but I have a use case where it actually would be useful to provide a UI to let the admin control the sort order of snippets (exposing the sort _order as an editable field on the snippet model would be a cumbersome way to have the admin control the overall ordering).

For example, suppose I have a Category snippet (some page types in my app can be associated with a Category), and part of the public-facing site will need to display a list of these categories (manually ordered, as opposed to alphabetically or something). I would envision implementing something along these lines:

@register_snippet
class Category(Orderable):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)

    panels = [
        FieldPanel('name')
    ]


class CustomPage(Page):
   category = models.ForeignKey(Category, related_name='pages')

CustomPage.content_panels = Page.content_panels + [
    SnippetChooserPanel('category', Category)
]

Is it possible to incorporate the ordering UI into the snippet listing UI in the Wagtail admin? Or...am I approaching this whole thing wrong?

thanks,

Lev

[Brett Grace]

The UI for Orderable works objects that are related to another entity (in other words, something is Orderable with respect to a container or parent object). The easiest way to achieve what you is to make another snippet, something like "CategoryMenu", that has a relationship to an Orderable object like your Category.

I did something similar to create arbitrary menus here: https://gist.github.com/bgrace/a5216b4059007924a75c

[Lev Kanter]

Thanks for the tip, Brett. Totally hadn't thought of that-- that's pretty awesome!

[YusufSalahAdDin]

I think that needs a html template, can you do it? and, can you put here a screen show?

[Brett Grace]

This uses all of the default admin stuff as far as I remember. I didn't need to to provide any extra HTML to make this work. I coded it for an earlier version of Wagtail, probably 0.4 or so. However I expect it would still work with recent versions of Wagtail.

What sort of defect are you seeing?

Or do you mean, HTML to make it work in your own templates? I did it with a custom tag:

@register.assignment_tag(takes_context=False)
def load_site_menu(menu_name):
    menu = NavigationMenu.objects.filter(menu_name=menu_name)

    if menu:
        return menu[0].menu_items.all()
    else:
        return None

Then in your template:

{% load_site_menu "footer" as footer_menu_items %}

{% for menu_item in footer_menu_items %}

<li>

    <a href="{{ menu_item.url }}">{{ menu_item }}</a>

</li>

{% endfor %}

You have to create a NavigationMenu named "footer" in the admin for this to work.

There are a bunch of ways to do this, you can also get the menu in an individual page and set it into the page context, or make it a property on the page.

[YusufSalahAdDin]

Thank you very much.