Frequently Asked Questions

Entries

I want to write my entries in MarkDown, RestructuredText or any lightweight markup language, is it possible ?

Yes of course, Zinnia currently support MarkDown, Textile and reStructuredText as markup languages, but if you want to write your entries in a custom markup language a solution is to disable the WYSIWYG editor in the admin site with the ZINNIA_WYSIWYG setting, and use the appropriate template filter in your templates.

I want to have multilingual support on the entries, is it possible ?

Due to the extending capabilities of Zinnia, many solutions on this problematic are possible, but you must keep in mind that multiplingual entries is just a concept, the needs and the implementations can differ from a project to another. But you should take a look on this excellent tutorial to convert Zinnia into a multilingual Weblog with django-modeltranslation, which can be a good starting point for your needs.

Is Zinnia able to allow multiple users to edit it’s own blog ?

Zinnia is designed to be multi-site. That’s mean you can publish entries on several sites or share an admin interface for all the sites handled.

Zinnia also provides a new permission that’s allow or not the user to change the authors. Useful for collaborative works.

But if you want to restrict the edition of the entries by site, authors or whatever you want, it’s your job to implement this functionality in your project.

The simple way to do that, respecting the Django rules, is to override the admin classes provided by Zinnia, and register those classes in another admin site.

Images

How can I use the image field for fitting to my skin ?

Take a looks at sorl.thumbnail and use his templatetags.

You can do something like this in your templates:

<img src="{% thumbnail object.image 250x250 %}" />

Comments

Is it possible have a different comment system, with reply feature for example ?

Yes the comment system integrated in Zinnia is based on django_comments and can be extended or replaced if doesn’t quite fit your needs. You should take a look on the customizing the comments framework documentation for more information.

Warning

The custom comment Model must be inherited from Comment and implement the CommentManager to properly work with Zinnia.

If you want the ability to reply on comments, you can take a look at zinnia-threaded-comments or at django-threadcomments.