Using django CMS¶
django CMS lets you edit your website on the website itself. You log in, and your pages gain a toolbar: double-click a heading to rewrite it, drag a section into a new place, drop in an image where you need one — on the page, in context, seeing what your visitors will see.
Nothing goes public by accident: your changes stay drafts until you publish them. On sites using versioning, earlier published versions remain available for comparison and restoration.
This guide is for the people who fill a django CMS site with content: editors, authors and site administrators. It assumes no knowledge of Django, HTML or programming.
Start here¶
Tutorial¶
New to django CMS? Start here. From your first login to a published page, in about half an hour.
How-to guides¶
Recipes for everyday tasks: add an image, reuse a footer on every page, translate a page, undo a change that went wrong.
Concepts¶
Why django CMS works the way it does. Placeholders, plugins, drafts and versions, reusable content.
Reference¶
Look things up: the toolbar menus, the page tree, the page settings, the version states, and the plugins installed on your site.
What you can do¶
Build and organise your site’s pages — create them, nest them, rename their URLs, decide what appears in the navigation.
Put images on a page, on their own or inside a text, from a media library shared by the whole site.
Add links and buttons that keep working even when the page they point at moves.
Maintain a footer, a banner or a contact block in one place and show it on as many pages as you like.
Publish a page in several languages, each one edited and published independently.
Compare, restore or discard versions — review retained versions and recover content from an earlier one.
Organise the files of your site in the media library.
Redirect an old address so visitors and search engines still find the content.
About this guide¶
django CMS sites are highly customisable and vary a great deal. The examples here follow the quickstart project from GitHub, which provides a typical set of features — all of them optional for your own site. Where a section only applies to a particular package, it says so at the top.
The origin of this document is a guide provided by Kapt.mobi. It has been translated from the native French and extended.
Note
This guide is a priority for the django CMS project, and it is never finished. If you would like to contribute — a correction, a missing how-to, a screenshot — we would love to hear from you: join us on our friendly Discord channel.
Take the whole guide with you
This guide is also available as one document you can read offline, print, improve, or hand to a new colleague: download the user guide (ODT). It opens in LibreOffice, Word, Pages and Google Docs. The file is rebuilt with the rest of the guide, so it is never out of date.