Welcome to django-portlets’s documentation!

What is it?

Portlets are pieces of content which are managed in Slots. Slots can be freely defined and placed anywhere within a HTML page.

django-portlets provides just a generic engine to manage portlets. You can find a comprehensive implementation within LFS.

Installation

To install just do:

  1. python setup.py install or easy_install django-portlets
  2. Add portlets to INSTALLED_APPS.

Usage

In order to use django-portlets you first have to implement a portlet. This is done by inheriting from the provided base class, for instance:

Create a portlet

Let’s create a simple text portlet:

# django imports
from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from portlets.models import Portlet

class TextPortlet(Portlet):
    """A simple portlet to display some text.
    """
    text = models.TextField(_(u"Text"), blank=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return "%s" % self.id

    def render(self, context):
        """Renders the portlet as html.
        """
        return render_to_string("portlets/text_portlet.html", {
            "title" : self.title,
            "text" : self.text
        })

    def form(self, **kwargs):
        """
        """
        return TextPortletForm(instance=self, **kwargs)

class TextPortletForm(forms.ModelForm):
    """Form for the TextPortlet.
    """
    class Meta:
        model = TextPortlet

Create the template

To display the content of the portlet we will have to create a simple template in this case text_portlet.html. It can look like this:

<div class="portlet">
    <div class="portlet-header">
        {{ title }}
    </div>
    <div class="portlet-body">
        {{ text|safe }}
    </div>
</div>

Register the portlet

In order to make it available for selection, the portlet has to be registered (make sure that this is called, when django starts up):

from portlets.utils import register_portlet
register_portlet(TextPortlet, "TextPortlet")

To display portlets within your templates, just use the provided portlet_slot tag, e.g.:

{% load portlets_tags %}

<table>
     <tr>
         <td>
             {% portlet_slot 'Left' flatpage %}
         </td>
         <td>
             Content goes here.
         </td>
         <td>
             {% portlet_slot 'Right' flatpage %}
         </td>
     </tr>
</table>

Example

django-portlets provides a simple example with a complete implementation of a portlet. Please refer to it if you wan to write your own portlets.

Installation of the example

  1. Install flatpages (flatpages serve as our example content)

  2. Add the portlets and portlets.example to INSTALLED_APPS

  3. Sync the database

    $ bin/django syncdb

  4. Go to django admin and:

    1. add a flatpage
    2. add a TextPortlet
    3. assign the TextPortlet to the flatpage (via PortletAssignment)
  5. Browse to the flatpage

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