Advanced Configuration¶

Sitemaps¶

One of the cool features of Django is the sitemap application, so if you want to fill your Web site’s sitemap with the entries of your blog, follow these steps.

Register django.contrib.sitemaps in the INSTALLED_APPS section.

Edit your project’s URLs and add this code:

from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import index
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap

from zinnia.sitemaps import AuthorSitemap
from zinnia.sitemaps import CategorySitemap
from zinnia.sitemaps import EntrySitemap
from zinnia.sitemaps import TagSitemap

sitemaps = {
    'tags': TagSitemap,
    'blog': EntrySitemap,
    'authors': AuthorSitemap,
    'categories': CategorySitemap
}

urlpatterns += [
    url(r'^sitemap.xml$',
        index,
        {'sitemaps': sitemaps}),
    url(r'^sitemap-(?P<section>.+)\.xml$',
        sitemap,
        {'sitemaps': sitemaps},
        name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap'),
]

Templates for entries¶

In your Weblog you will always publish entries, but sometimes you want to have a different look and feel for special entries.

You may want to publish an entry with a short content like a quote, in which case it would be better not to provide a continue reading link when rendering this entry.

To solve this problem, Zinnia allows the user to select a template to render the entry’s content and the entry’s detail page.

In order to use a template without the continue reading link, we need to register it under this setting in the project’s configuration:

ZINNIA_ENTRY_CONTENT_TEMPLATES = [
  ('zinnia/_short_entry_detail.html', 'Short entry template'),
]

Now we will create the zinnia/_short_entry_detail.html template with this sample of code:

{% extends "zinnia/_entry_detail.html" %}

{% block continue-reading %}{% endblock %}

A new template is now available in the admin interface to display the entry without the continue reading link when displayed in a list.

Then if you want to have custom rendering of the detail page of the entry, by displaying the entry fullwidth without the sidebar for example, the same process applies. We will add this setting in the project’s configuration:

ZINNIA_ENTRY_DETAIL_TEMPLATES = [
    ('zinnia/fullwidth_entry_detail.html', 'Fullwidth template'),
]

And now we finally create the zinnia/fullwidth_entry_detail.html template with this sample of code:

{% extends "zinnia/entry_detail.html" %}

{% block sidebar-class %}no-sidebar{% endblock %}

{% block sidebar %}{% endblock %}

Pinging¶

By default Zinnia is configured to ping the directories and the external urls embedded in your entries when a new entry is published.

If you want to completly remove these features, simply set these settings in your project’s configuration:

ZINNIA_PING_EXTERNAL_URLS = False
ZINNIA_SAVE_PING_DIRECTORIES = False

You can also edit the list of the directories to be pinged by using this setting:

ZINNIA_PING_DIRECTORIES = ('http://ping.directory.com/',
                           'http://pong.directory.com/')

Markup languages¶

If you doesn’t want to write your entries in HTML, because you are an über coder knowing more than 42 programming languages, you have the possibility to use a custom markup language for editing the entries.

Currently MarkDown, Textile and reStructuredText are supported, so if you want to use one of these languages, first set this setting as appropriate in your project’s settings.

ZINNIA_MARKUP_LANGUAGE = 'restructuredtext'

Note that the name of the language must be in lowercase.

Then install the corresponding library to your needs:

textile – requires Textile >= 2.1.5
markdown – requires Markdown >= 2.3.1
restructuredtext – requires Docutils >= 0.10

Cache¶

For performance considerations the Django’s cache API is used when comparing the entries between them. To isolate these operations, the CACHES setting must contain a value named 'comparison', otherwise the 'default' value will be used.

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache',
    },
    'comparison': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache',
        'LOCATION': 'comparison',
        'TIMEOUT': None,
   }
}

XML-RPC¶

Zinnia provides few Webservices via XML-RPC, but before using it, you need to install django-xmlrpc.

Then register django_xmlrpc in your INSTALLED_APPS section of your project’s settings.

Finally we need to register the URL of the XML-RPC server. Insert something like this in your project’s urls.py:

url(r'^xmlrpc/$', 'django_xmlrpc.views.handle_xmlrpc'),

Note

For the Pingback service check if your site is enabled for pingback detection. More information at http://hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback-1.0#TOC2