Hi, I'm Matthias

I am a founding partner of Feinheit AG and Die Bruchpiloten AG. Find me on GitHub, Mastodon, LinkedIn or by email.

2018-09-23

Bringing FeinCMS and django-content-editor/feincms3 closer together

If I had more time those are the features I would try to implement next:

Reimplement FeinCMS’s TreeEditor using django-mptt’s DraggableMPTTAdmin

This shouldn’t be a big effort. The toggleable booleans are probably the only feature from the TreeEditor that haven’t made it into django-mptt.

Add features to django-content-editor

Moving content blocks as a group

It would be awesome if it was possible to collapse the content blocks’ fieldsets, mark consecutive blocks and move them as a group.

Adding content blocks in the middle and improving reordering

Right now it’s only possible to add new content blocks at the end; only after saving is it allowed to move new blocks in-between pre-existing content. This is a limitation of django’s InlineFormset respectively of django-content-editor’s naive reuse which expects new inline instances to always be ordered after existing forms.

I suspect that by using flexbox’s order attribute and some custom JavaScript code it should be possible to keep the ordering of inlines stable in the HTML code. If that was true the backend code wouldn’t have to be changed, which would also keep maintenance lower for the future.

The ItemEditor from FeinCMS supports adding content in the middle, but if users dynamically add and remove other content blocks (which makes Django’s inlines.js renumber all formsets) a crash when saving is almost a certainty.

Reimplement FeinCMS’s ItemEditor using django-content-editor

This shouldn’t be too hard either. Right now the content editor’s JavaScript code assumes too much about the related_name field of plugins’ parent foreign key, but apart from this the content editor’s code should work right away.

In FeinCMS-land, the ItemEditorInline should extend the ContentEditorInline. The biggest pain point with the ItemEditorInline is that it supports adding additional fields to individual instances’ forms (the admin_fields feature of ApplicationContent requires this).

There should be a good way to undo changes

Enough said.