ToolPart Team

After our site was finished we wanted to add a blog to it. Althought FeinCMS was the most suitable Content Management System for us, its blog content is more of an example and not really ussable. We have tried to make it work, but it was only a waste of time. You can see on http://groups.google.com/group/django-feincms that others have the same problem. We have searched the net to find a blog engine that was easy to use and we could easily integrate it with feincms. We have decided to use Mingus. Mingus itself leverages only existing reusable apps, and django-snippets. The heart of Mingus is the basic-blog from django-basic-apps. It is simple and well designed.

The integration of Mingus with FeinCMS was quite easy. I have downloaded the latest Django-Mingus package from GitHub. Then put it in the class path so my previously built FeinCMS page can access it, then installed all the apps from the requirements file.

• settings.py: after this I have added the 'mingus' to INSTALLED_APPS I've had to merge mingus' settings with feincms'.

• urls.py as feincms is set up to handle all the pages, it is the last entry in our urls.py. So I've merged mingus' urlpatterns by adding one line

  url(r'^blog/', include('mingus.urls')),

• Template files: Mingus has a base.html that is extended by all their templates. We had a base.html as well, but it had nothing mingus related, and we didn't wanted to add everything to it as our feincms templates extend it as well. Moreover mingus uses much more javascript than our simple CMS pages, etc.. But Mingus has a blog/base_blog.html page as well. So we've decided to overwrite this one, and all the mingus extends to use this one. As sometimes we need disqus, this turned out to be a bit tricky. Finally, we've defined a new block called disqus that is usually rewritten to be empty.

• JavaScript and css: one of the reasons why we've chosen mingus was that it incorporates plenty of nice scripts, like the prettify javascript. Of course these should be added to our templates as well, moreover we had to copy/symlink them under MEDIA_ROOT.

As a last step we've run syncdb, and now we have a nice mingus blog together with feincms.