Django edit static content on live site - html

Question

I am having real difficulty working out how I can edit the html and css on a live site via logging into the site as a privileged user in Django (if this is possible in Flask I may use it instead). For example modifying the background image used on a page. ckeditor allow you to do this for model fields:
class Post(models.Model):
content = RichTextField()
But not for the static html or css. How do people normally do this - make all changes on a test machine the push the .html and css to the live site? Ideally I want the designer to be able to log in and modify the site with a wysiwyg tool without needing a developer.

Answer 1

If you want to achieve editing of the layout files of the site like Wordpress does it for themes, you are going to need to implement an app to do that yourself, I'm not aware of any existing project that allows you to do that, in Django or in Flask.
In a nutshell, you need to pick out what files you want to expose and have a view where you load up the text file open(file), display it in a Django Form in a textarea, and save it back to the file again.
If you're editing css files, depending on your setup, you might need to trigger a collectstatic command on form save, so that the file goes where it is needed.
You could also use Ace Editor for easier code editing.
This is a stripped down example of what I used in a previous project for achieving this:
class EditFileView(FormView):
template_name = "file_edit_form.html"
form_class = EditFileForm
ALLOWED_ROOTS = ["%s/" % DISPLAY_TEMPLATES_DIRECTORY, ]
def get_allowed_roots(self):
return self.ALLOWED_ROOTS
def dispatch(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
if "file_name" not in request.GET:
raise Http404
file_name = request.GET['file_name']
exists = False
for root in self.get_allowed_roots():
exists = os.path.exists(os.path.join(root, file_name))
if exists:
self.file_path = os.path.join(root, file_name)
self.file_name = file_name
self.root = root
break
if not exists:
logger.debug(u"EditFileView: Could not find file to edit - %s" % file_name)
raise Http404()
return super(EditFileView, self).dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs)
def form_valid(self, form):
try:
f = open(self.file_path, "wt")
f.write(form.cleaned_data['file_contents'])
f.close()
except Exception, e:
pass
return HttpResponseRedirect(self.get_success_url())
def get_initial(self):
initial = super(EditFileView, self).get_initial()
with open("%s" % self.file_path, "r") as f:
initial['file_contents'] = f.read()
initial["file_path"] = self.file_path
return initial
def get_success_url(self):
return reverse("edit_file") + "?file_name=%s" % self.file_name
def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
current = super(EditFileView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
current.update({"file_name": self.file_path[len(self.root):].replace("//", "/")})
return current