Page models¶
Each page type (a.k.a. content type) in Wagtail is represented by a Django model. All page models must inherit from the wagtail.core.models.Page
class.
As all page types are Django models, you can use any field type that Django provides. See Model field reference for a complete list of field types you can use. Wagtail also provides RichTextField
which provides a WYSIWYG editor for editing rich-text content.
Django models
If you’re not yet familiar with Django models, have a quick look at the following links to get you started:
An example Wagtail page model¶
This example represents a typical blog post:
from django.db import models
from modelcluster.fields import ParentalKey
from wagtail.core.models import Page, Orderable
from wagtail.core.fields import RichTextField
from wagtail.admin.edit_handlers import FieldPanel, MultiFieldPanel, InlinePanel
from wagtail.images.edit_handlers import ImageChooserPanel
from wagtail.search import index
class BlogPage(Page):
# Database fields
body = RichTextField()
date = models.DateField("Post date")
feed_image = models.ForeignKey(
'wagtailimages.Image',
null=True,
blank=True,
on_delete=models.SET_NULL,
related_name='+'
)
# Search index configuration
search_fields = Page.search_fields + [
index.SearchField('body'),
index.FilterField('date'),
]
# Editor panels configuration
content_panels = Page.content_panels + [
FieldPanel('date'),
FieldPanel('body', classname="full"),
InlinePanel('related_links', label="Related links"),
]
promote_panels = [
MultiFieldPanel(Page.promote_panels, "Common page configuration"),
ImageChooserPanel('feed_image'),
]
# Parent page / subpage type rules
parent_page_types = ['blog.BlogIndex']
subpage_types = []
class BlogPageRelatedLink(Orderable):
page = ParentalKey(BlogPage, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='related_links')
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
url = models.URLField()
panels = [
FieldPanel('name'),
FieldPanel('url'),
]
Important
Ensure that none of your field names are the same as your class names. This will cause errors due to the way Django handles relations (read more). In our examples we have avoided this by appending “Page” to each model name.
Writing page models¶
Here we’ll describe each section of the above example to help you create your own page models.
Database fields¶
Each Wagtail page type is a Django model, represented in the database as a separate table.
Each page type can have its own set of fields. For example, a news article may have body text and a published date, whereas an event page may need separate fields for venue and start/finish times.
In Wagtail, you can use any Django field class. Most field classes provided by third party apps should work as well.
Wagtail also provides a couple of field classes of its own:
RichTextField
- For rich text contentStreamField
- A block-based content field (see: Freeform page content using StreamField)
For tagging, Wagtail fully supports django-taggit so we recommend using that.
Search¶
The search_fields
attribute defines which fields are added to the search index and how they are indexed.
This should be a list of SearchField
and FilterField
objects. SearchField
adds a field for full-text search. FilterField
adds a field for filtering the results. A field can be indexed with both SearchField
and FilterField
at the same time (but only one instance of each).
In the above example, we’ve indexed body
for full-text search and date
for filtering.
The arguments that these field types accept are documented in Indexing extra fields.
Editor panels¶
There are a few attributes for defining how the page’s fields will be arranged in the page editor interface:
content_panels
- For content, such as main body textpromote_panels
- For metadata, such as tags, thumbnail image and SEO titlesettings_panels
- For settings, such as publish date
Each of these attributes is set to a list of EditHandler
objects, which defines which fields appear on which tabs and how they are structured on each tab.
Here’s a summary of the EditHandler
classes that Wagtail provides out of the box. See Available panel types for full descriptions.
Basic
These allow editing of model fields. The FieldPanel
class will choose the correct widget based on the type of the field, though StreamField
fields need to use a specialised panel class.
Structural
These are used for structuring fields in the interface.
MultiFieldPanel
- For grouping similar fields togetherInlinePanel
- For inlining child modelsFieldRowPanel
- For organising multiple fields into a single row
Chooser
ForeignKey
fields to certain models can use one of the below ChooserPanel
classes. These add a nice modal chooser interface, and the image/document choosers also allow uploading new files without leaving the page editor.
Note
In order to use one of these choosers, the model being linked to must either be a page, image, document or snippet.
To link to any other model type, you should use FieldPanel
, which will create a dropdown box.
Customising the page editor interface¶
The page editor can be customised further. See Customising the editing interface.
Parent page / subpage type rules¶
These two attributes allow you to control where page types may be used in your site. It allows you to define rules like “blog entries may only be created under a blog index”.
Both take a list of model classes or model names. Model names are of the format app_label.ModelName
. If the app_label
is omitted, the same app is assumed.
parent_page_types
limits which page types this type can be created undersubpage_types
limits which page types can be created under this type
By default, any page type can be created under any page type and it is not necessary to set these attributes if that’s the desired behaviour.
Setting parent_page_types
to an empty list is a good way of preventing a particular page type from being created in the editor interface.
Page URLs¶
The most common method of retrieving page URLs is by using the {% pageurl %}
template tag. Since it’s called from a template, pageurl
automatically includes the optimizations mentioned below. For more information, see pageurl.
Page models also include several low-level methods for overriding or accessing page URLs.
Customising URL patterns for a page model¶
The Page.get_url_parts(request)
method will not typically be called directly, but may be overridden to define custom URL routing for a given page model. It should return a tuple of (site_id, root_url, page_path)
, which are used by get_url
and get_full_url
(see below) to construct the given type of page URL.
When overriding get_url_parts()
, you should accept *args, **kwargs
:
def get_url_parts(self, *args, **kwargs):
and pass those through at the point where you are calling get_url_parts
on super
(if applicable), e.g.:
super().get_url_parts(*args, **kwargs)
While you could pass only the request
keyword argument, passing all arguments as-is ensures compatibility with any
future changes to these method signatures.
For more information, please see wagtail.core.models.Page.get_url_parts()
.
Obtaining URLs for page instances¶
The Page.get_url(request)
method can be called whenever a page URL is needed. It defaults to returning local URLs (not including the protocol or domain) if it determines that the page is on the current site (via the hostname in request
); otherwise, a full URL including the protocol and domain is returned. Whenever possible, the optional request
argument should be included to enable per-request caching of site-level URL information and facilitate the generation of local URLs.
A common use case for get_url(request)
is in any custom template tag your project may include for generating navigation menus. When writing such a custom template tag, ensure that it includes takes_context=True
and use context.get('request')
to safely pass the
request or None
if no request exists in the context.
For more information, please see wagtail.core.models.Page.get_url()
.
In the event a full URL (including the protocol and domain) is needed, Page.get_full_url(request)
can be used instead. Whenever possible, the optional request
argument should be included to enable per-request caching of site-level URL information. For more information, please see wagtail.core.models.Page.get_full_url()
.
Template rendering¶
Each page model can be given an HTML template which is rendered when a user browses to a page on the site frontend. This is the simplest and most common way to get Wagtail content to end users (but not the only way).
Adding a template for a page model¶
Wagtail automatically chooses a name for the template based on the app label and model class name.
Format: <app_label>/<model_name (snake cased)>.html
For example, the template for the above blog page will be: blog/blog_page.html
You just need to create a template in a location where it can be accessed with this name.
Template context¶
Wagtail renders templates with the page
variable bound to the page instance being rendered. Use this to access the content of the page. For example, to get the title of the current page, use {{ page.title }}
. All variables provided by context processors are also available.
Customising template context¶
All pages have a get_context
method that is called whenever the template is rendered and returns a dictionary of variables to bind into the template.
To add more variables to the template context, you can override this method:
class BlogIndexPage(Page):
...
def get_context(self, request):
context = super().get_context(request)
# Add extra variables and return the updated context
context['blog_entries'] = BlogPage.objects.child_of(self).live()
return context
The variables can then be used in the template:
{{ page.title }}
{% for entry in blog_entries %}
{{ entry.title }}
{% endfor %}
Changing the template¶
Set the template
attribute on the class to use a different template file:
class BlogPage(Page):
...
template = 'other_template.html'
Dynamically choosing the template¶
The template can be changed on a per-instance basis by defining a get_template
method on the page class. This method is called every time the page is rendered:
class BlogPage(Page):
...
use_other_template = models.BooleanField()
def get_template(self, request):
if self.use_other_template:
return 'blog/other_blog_page.html'
return 'blog/blog_page.html'
In this example, pages that have the use_other_template
boolean field set will use the blog/other_blog_page.html
template. All other pages will use the default blog/blog_page.html
.
Ajax Templates¶
If you want to add AJAX functionality to a page, such as a paginated listing that updates in-place on the page rather than triggering a full page reload, you can set the ajax_template
attribute to specify an alternative template to be used when the page is requested via an AJAX call (as indicated by the X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
HTTP header):
class BlogPage(Page):
...
ajax_template = 'other_template_fragment.html'
template = 'other_template.html'
More control over page rendering¶
All page classes have a serve()
method that internally calls the get_context
and get_template
methods and renders the template. This method is similar to a Django view function, taking a Django Request
object and returning a Django Response
object.
This method can also be overridden for complete control over page rendering.
For example, here’s a way to make a page respond with a JSON representation of itself:
from django.http import JsonResponse
class BlogPage(Page):
...
def serve(self, request):
return JsonResponse({
'title': self.title,
'body': self.body,
'date': self.date,
# Resizes the image to 300px width and gets a URL to it
'feed_image': self.feed_image.get_rendition('width-300').url,
})
Inline models¶
Wagtail can nest the content of other models within the page. This is useful for creating repeated fields, such as related links or items to display in a carousel. Inline model content is also versioned with the rest of the page content.
Each inline model requires the following:
- It must inherit from
wagtail.core.models.Orderable
- It must have a
ParentalKey
to the parent model
Note
django-modelcluster and ParentalKey
The model inlining feature is provided by django-modelcluster and the ParentalKey
field type must be imported from there:
from modelcluster.fields import ParentalKey
ParentalKey
is a subclass of Django’s ForeignKey
, and takes the same arguments.
For example, the following inline model can be used to add related links (a list of name, url pairs) to the BlogPage
model:
from django.db import models
from modelcluster.fields import ParentalKey
from wagtail.core.models import Orderable
class BlogPageRelatedLink(Orderable):
page = ParentalKey(BlogPage, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='related_links')
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
url = models.URLField()
panels = [
FieldPanel('name'),
FieldPanel('url'),
]
To add this to the admin interface, use the InlinePanel
edit panel class:
content_panels = [
...
InlinePanel('related_links', label="Related links"),
]
The first argument must match the value of the related_name
attribute of the ParentalKey
.
Working with pages¶
Wagtail uses Django’s multi-table inheritance feature to allow multiple page models to be used in the same tree.
Each page is added to both Wagtail’s builtin Page
model as well as its user-defined model (such as the BlogPage
model created earlier).
Pages can exist in Python code in two forms, an instance of Page
or an instance of the page model.
When working with multiple page types together, you will typically use instances of Wagtail’sPage
model, which don’t give you access to any fields specific to their type.
# Get all pages in the database
>>> from wagtail.core.models import Page
>>> Page.objects.all()
[<Page: Homepage>, <Page: About us>, <Page: Blog>, <Page: A Blog post>, <Page: Another Blog post>]
When working with a single page type, you can work with instances of the user-defined model. These give access to all the fields available in Page
, along with any user-defined fields for that type.
# Get all blog entries in the database
>>> BlogPage.objects.all()
[<BlogPage: A Blog post>, <BlogPage: Another Blog post>]
You can convert a Page
object to its more specific user-defined equivalent using the .specific
property. This may cause an additional database lookup.
>>> page = Page.objects.get(title="A Blog post")
>>> page
<Page: A Blog post>
# Note: the blog post is an instance of Page so we cannot access body, date or feed_image
>>> page.specific
<BlogPage: A Blog post>
Tips¶
Friendly model names¶
You can make your model names more friendly to users of Wagtail by using Django’s internal Meta
class with a verbose_name
, e.g.:
class HomePage(Page):
...
class Meta:
verbose_name = "homepage"
When users are given a choice of pages to create, the list of page types is generated by splitting your model names on each of their capital letters. Thus a HomePage
model would be named “Home Page” which is a little clumsy. Defining verbose_name
as in the example above would change this to read “Homepage”, which is slightly more conventional.
Page QuerySet ordering¶
Page
-derived models cannot be given a default ordering by using the standard Django approach of adding an ordering
attribute to the internal Meta
class.
class NewsItemPage(Page):
publication_date = models.DateField()
...
class Meta:
ordering = ('-publication_date', ) # will not work
This is because Page
enforces ordering QuerySets by path. Instead, you must apply the ordering explicitly when constructing a QuerySet:
news_items = NewsItemPage.objects.live().order_by('-publication_date')
Custom Page managers¶
You can add a custom Manager
to your Page
class. Any custom Managers should inherit from wagtail.core.models.PageManager
:
from django.db import models
from wagtail.core.models import Page, PageManager
class EventPageManager(PageManager):
""" Custom manager for Event pages """
class EventPage(Page):
start_date = models.DateField()
objects = EventPageManager()
Alternately, if you only need to add extra QuerySet
methods, you can inherit from wagtail.core.models.PageQuerySet
, and call from_queryset()
to build a custom Manager
:
from django.db import models
from django.utils import timezone
from wagtail.core.models import Page, PageManager, PageQuerySet
class EventPageQuerySet(PageQuerySet):
def future(self):
today = timezone.localtime(timezone.now()).date()
return self.filter(start_date__gte=today)
EventPageManager = PageManager.from_queryset(EventPageQuerySet)
class EventPage(Page):
start_date = models.DateField()
objects = EventPageManager()