FeinCMS 1.3 release notes

FeinCMS 1.3 includes many bugfixes and cleanups and a number of new features. The cleanups and features caused a few backwards incompatible changes. The upgrade path is outlined below.

Highlights

• FeinCMS pages use the standard Django permalink mechanism inside the get_absolute_url implementation. This means that you have to update the URL definition if you did not include feincms.urls directly.

  Change this:

  url(r'^$|^(.*)/$', 'feincms.views.base.handler'),
  

  to this:

  url(r'', include('feincms.urls')),
  

  Defining the URL patterns directly is still possible. Have a look at feincms.urls to find out how this should be done.

• FeinCMS requires at least Django 1.2 but already has support for Django 1.3 features such as staticfiles. The FeinCMS media file folder has been moved from feincms/media/feincms to feincms/static/feincms - if you use django.contrib.staticfiles with Django 1.3 (and you should!), FeinCMS’ media files for the administration interface will automatically be made available without any further work on your part.

• Content types can specify the media files (Javascript and CSS files) they need to work correctly. See Extra media for content types for information on how to use this in your own content types.

• The content type loading process has been streamlined and requires much less database queries than before. The performance hit on sites with deep page hierarchies, inheritance and many regions is several times smaller than before.

• The content type interface has been extended with two new methods, available for all content types which need it: process is called before rendering pages and is guaranteed to receive the current request instance. Each and every content type (not only application contents as before) has the ability to return full HTTP responses which are returned directly to the user. finalize is called after rendering and can be used to set HTTP headers and do other post-processing tasks. See Influencing request processing through a content type for more information.

(Backwards incompatible and other) Changes

• The default ContentProxy has been rewritten to load all content type instances on initialization. The instances stay around for the full request-response cycle which allows us to remove many quasi-global variables (variables attached to the request object). The new initialization is much more efficient in terms of SQL queries needed; the implementation is contained inside the ContentProxy class and not distributed all over the place.

• The ContactFormContent has been updated to take advantage of the new content type interface where content types can influence the request-response cycle in more ways.

• The ct_tracker extension has been rewritten to take advantage of the new ContentProxy features. This means that the format of _ct_inventory could not be kept backwards compatible and has been changed. The inventory is versioned now, therefore upgrading should not require any action on your part.

• feincms_site is not available in the context anymore. It was undocumented, mostly unused and badly named anyway. If you still need this functionality you should use django.contrib.sites directly yourself.

• The _feincms_appcontent_parameters has been folded into the _feincms_extra_context attribute on the current request. The appcontent_parameters template tag is not necessary anymore (the content of _feincms_extra_context is guaranteed to be available in the template context) and has been removed.

  In your appcontent code, change all references of _feincms_appcontent_parameters to _feincms_extra_context, e.g.

  params = getattr(request, ‘_feincms_appcontent_parameters’, {})

  becomes

  params = getattr(request, ‘_feincms_extra_context’, {})

• As part of the effort to reduce variables attached to the request object (acting as a replacement for global variables), request.extra_path has been removed. The same information can be accessed via request._feincms_extra_context['extra_path'].

• The feincms.views.applicationcontent module has been removed. The special casing it provided for application content-using pages aren’t necessary anymore.

• The page’s get_absolute_url method uses URL reversion for determining the URL of pages instead of returning _cached_url. This means that you need to modify your URLconf entries if you added them to your own urls.py instead of including feincms.urls. Please make sure that you have two named URL patterns, feincms_home and feincms_handler:

  from feincms.views.base import handler
  
  urlpatterns = patterns('',
      # ... your patterns ...
  
      url(r'^$', handler, name='feincms_home'),
      url(r'^(.*)/$', handler, name='feincms_handler'),
  )
  

  If you want the old behavior back, all you need to do is add the following code to your settings.py:

  ABSOLUTE_URL_OVERRIDES = {
      'page.page': lambda page: page._cached_url,
      }
  

• The copy/replace and preview mechanisms never worked quite right. They were completely dropped from this release. If you still need the ability to create copies of objects, use the standard Django ModelAdmin.save_as feature.