Usage

Usage instructions

Page tree

Fiber was designed to coexist with your existing Django apps. In addition to the URLs that you define in your urls.py files you can create a tree of URLs that Fiber uses to create menus. Each node of the tree is a Page, which:

  • has a title
  • lives at a specific URL
  • references a template
  • serve as a placeholder for Content items
  • can optionally redirect to another URL
  • has some more tricks up its sleeve we’ll talk about later

So before you can use Fiber template tags in your templates, you first have to create the Page tree. A simple Page tree might look like this:

  • mainmenu
    • Home
    • About us
      • Mission
      • Our people
    • News

The root node is a special Page, whose sole purpose is to group Pages into a menu. The title of the root node is used to reference the menu when writing out the menu in your templates. The other properties of the root node (like URL) are ignored by Fiber.

Note: You can create multiple root nodes to create multiple, independent menus.

Pages

The URL of a Page can be specified in 3 different ways:

  • as an absolute URL, like this: /this/is/an/absolute-url/
  • as a relative URL, like this: relative-url
  • as a named URL, like this: “news_item_list”

Absolute URLs

Using absolute URLs, you can specify the full URL path to the Page. Absolute URLs should start (and preferably also end) with a slash. You can also specify links to external sites by providing the full URL (starting with http:// or https://).

Relative URLs

Relative URLs are like folders on your computer. The full absolute URL of the Page is determined by walking up the tree, while concatenating relative URLs until the root node is reached, or until an absolute URL is encountered. Relative URLs should not contain slashes.

Named URLs

Named URLs are looked up in the urls.py files of all registered apps. Currently only named URLs that don’t have parameters are supported.

Templates

When you have created your Page tree, you can start using the Fiber template tags in your templates. At the beginning of your template(s), load the Fiber template tags:

{% load fiber_tags %}

Using the Fiber template tags, you can:

  • write out content items, that either
    • have a specified name
    • are linked to a specific location on the current page
    • are linked to a specific location on another page
  • write out valid XHTML menu structures
    • of pages below a named root page (this is the menu name),
    • limited to a minimum and maximum level (depth),
    • that mark the currently active page,
    • optionally expanding all descendants of the currently active page,
    • with all possible css hooks you could ever need

Content items

You can write out content items with the ‘show_content’ and ‘show_page_content’ template tags:

{% show_content "content_item_name" %}
{% show_page_content "block_name" %}
{% show_page_content other_page "block_name" %} other_page being a Page object

Examples

This shows content item named ‘address’:

{% show_content "address" %}

This shows content items that are linked to the location named ‘content’ on the current page:

{% show_page_content "content" %}

This shows content items that are linked to the location named ‘content’ on another page ‘other_page’:

{% show_page_content other_page "content" %}