Refactor out the plugin system to its own application about django-cms

[oliwarner]

This can be relatively simple from a backend perspective.

All that needs to happen to get things linking up correctly is making the Placeholder model link to any model. This could be done with contenttypes (slow) or it could be done by changing the object reference (page, currently an FK on Page) to a string and doing some simple serialisation.

So instead of storing a page pk (eg 3), it stores "Page:3".

This does mean that Placeholder wouldn't be easily able to look up the tree (ie access the Page object). I'm not sure if that's an issue but it would be anyway as if Placeholders are bound to non-page objects, they're not going to have Page-like footprints anyway. I would suggest making Placeholder completely independent.

The second and larger point to all of this is editing the Placeholders. There would need to be some interface. There could be an admin widget that gets thrown around but I think this would be a great opportunity to explore some on-page editing.

It would be relatively simple from there for non-CMS views to load the editing framework.

[digi604]

the problem we have at the moment is that we only can link to existing rows. So if you would use this in a blog for example. You would need to save the blog entry first before you can add plugins. This is very ugly on my point of view and I probably will do something like a generic foreign key and a custom edit-inline... something similar that feincms has but with our interface. Instead of placeholders we would make the whole thing a model.field or form.field.

[oliwarner]

You would need to save the blog entry first before you can add plugins

I don't see that as a major issue. The model I'm basic this on is Concrete5.
http://www.concrete5.org/

It's a PHP CMS that has a few things wrong with it (PHP for one) but its editing interface is pretty awesome (see the video on their homepage).

To create a page in that model, you have to create the page first and then you're presented with edit zones (placeholders if you will) that you can add "blocks" (plugins here) to. It works really well as an editing route.

[ojii]

this is sort of done with the placeholder fields. closing