15. Frequently Asked Questions

15.1. Templates

• The templates does not fit to my wishes. What can I do ?

  The templates provided for Zinnia are simple but complete and as generic as possible. But you can easily change them by specifying a template directory.

  You can also create your own app containing some Zinnia’s templates based on inheritance. You can find an app example with HTML5 templates for Zinnia which can be a good starting point to make your own at : Django Blog Quintet.

15.2. Comments

• Is it possible to have a better comment system, with reply feature for example ?

  Yes the comment system integrated in Zinnia is based on django.contrib.comments and can be extended or replaced.

  If you want the ability to reply on comments, you can take a look at django-threadcomments for example.

15.3. Edition

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

  Yes of course, disable de WYSIWYG in the admin site with the ZINNIA_WYSIWYG setting, and use the the markup application in your templates.

15.4. Authors

• 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.

15.5. 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 %}" />

• I want an image gallery in my posts, what can I do ?

  Simply create a new application with a model named EntryImage with a ForeignKey to the Entry model.

  Then in the admin module of your app, unregister the EntryAdmin class, and use ModelInline in your new admin class.

  Here an example :

  # The model
  from django.db import models
  from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
  
  from zinnia.models import Entry
  
  class EntryImage(models.Model):
      """Image Model"""
      entry = models.ForeignKey(Entry, verbose_name=_('entry'))
  
      image = models.ImageField(_('image'), upload_to='uploads/gallery')
      title = models.CharField(_('title'), max_length=250)
      description = models.TextField(_('description'), blank=True)
  
      def __unicode__(self):
          return self.title
  
  # The admin
  
  from django.contrib import admin
  
  from zinnia.models import Entry
  from zinnia.admin import EntryAdmin
  from gallery.models import EntryImage
  
  class EntryImageInline(admin.TabularInline):
      model = EntryImage
  
  class EntryAdminImage(EntryAdmin):
      inlines = (EntryImageInline,)
  
  admin.site.unregister(Entry)
  admin.site.register(Entry, EntryAdminImage)
  

  Another solution is to extend the EntryModel Extending Entry model