Django comes with an optional “flatpages” application. It lets you store simple “flat” HTML content in a database and handles the management for you via Django’s admin interface and a Python API.
A flatpage is a simple object with a URL, title and content. Use it for one-off, special-case pages, such as “About” or “Privacy Policy” pages, that you want to store in a database but for which you don’t want to develop a custom Django application.
A flatpage can use a custom template or a default, systemwide flatpage template. It can be associated with one, or multiple, sites.
The content field may optionally be left blank if you prefer to put your content in a custom template.
Here are some examples of flatpages on Django-powered sites:
To install the flatpages app, follow these steps:
Install the sites framework by adding 'django.contrib.sites' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting, if it’s not already in there.
Also make sure you’ve correctly set SITE_ID to the ID of the site the settings file represents. This will usually be 1 (i.e. SITE_ID = 1, but if you’re not using the sites framework to manage multiple sites, it could be the ID of a different site.
Add 'django.contrib.flatpages' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
Add 'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware' to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting.
Run the command manage.py syncdb.
manage.py syncdb creates two tables in your database: django_flatpage and django_flatpage_sites. django_flatpage is a simple lookup table that simply maps a URL to a title and bunch of text content. django_flatpage_sites associates a flatpage with a site.
The FlatpageFallbackMiddleware does all of the work. Each time any Django application raises a 404 error, this middleware checks the flatpages database for the requested URL as a last resort. Specifically, it checks for a flatpage with the given URL with a site ID that corresponds to the SITE_ID setting.
If it finds a match, it follows this algorithm:
If it doesn’t find a match, the request continues to be processed as usual.
The middleware only gets activated for 404s – not for 500s or responses of any other status code.
Note that the order of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES matters. Generally, you can put FlatpageFallbackMiddleware at the end of the list, because it’s a last resort.
For more on middleware, read the middleware docs.
Ensure that your 404 template works
Note that the FlatpageFallbackMiddleware only steps in once another view has successfully produced a 404 response. If another view or middleware class attempts to produce a 404 but ends up raising an exception instead (such as a TemplateDoesNotExist exception if your site does not have an appropriate template to use for HTTP 404 responses), the response will become an HTTP 500 (“Internal Server Error”) and the FlatpageFallbackMiddleware will not attempt to serve a flat page.
If you’ve activated the automatic Django admin interface, you should see a “Flatpages” section on the admin index page. Edit flatpages as you edit any other object in the system.
By default, flatpages are rendered via the template flatpages/default.html, but you can override that for a particular flatpage.
Creating the flatpages/default.html template is your responsibility; in your template directory, just create a flatpages directory containing a file default.html.
Flatpage templates are passed a single context variable, flatpage, which is the flatpage object.
Here’s a sample flatpages/default.html template:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>{{ flatpage.title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
{{ flatpage.content }}
</body>
</html>
Since you're already entering raw HTML into the admin page for a flatpage, both flatpage.title and flatpage.content are marked as not requiring automatic HTML escaping in the template.
Sep 20, 2009