django-slug-preview

An advanced slug field offering live URL previews.

This is inspired by the “Permalink” preview that WordPress offers. While not looking as fancy yet, this is a good start for Django projects. Improvements are welcome!

https://github.com/edoburu/django-slug-preview/raw/master/docs/images/slugpreview1.png

Installation

First install the module, preferably in a virtual environment. It can be installed from PyPI:

pip install django-slug-preview

Or the current folder can be installed for development:

pip install -e .

Add slug_preview to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS += (
    'slug_preview',
)

Usage

Use slug_preview.models.SlugPreviewField in your models instead of the standard models.SlugField.
Add slug_preview.forms.SlugPreviewFormMixin in your forms.

For example:

from django.db import models
from slug_preview.models import SlugPreviewField

class MyModel(models.Model):
    slug = SlugPreviewField(_("Slug"))

In the admin you can use the SlugPreviewModelForm shortcut:

from django.contrib import admin
from django import forms
from slug_preview.forms import SlugPreviewModelForm

@admin.register(MyModel)
class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = SlugPreviewModelForm

In custom forms, use SlugPreviewFormMixin directly:

from django import forms
from slug_preview.forms import SlugPreviewFormMixin
from .models import MyModel

class MyModelForm(SlugPreviewFormMixin, forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel

Special model URLS

When a model has a custom URL layout (not just /{slug}/), you can add a get_absolute_url_format() method in the model. For example:

from django.db import models
from slug_preview.models import SlugPreviewField

class Page(models.Model):
    parent = models.ForeignKey('self')
    slug = SlugPreviewField(_("Slug"))
    # ...


    def get_absolute_url(self):
        if self.parent_id:
            return "{0}{1}/".format(self.parent.get_absolute_url(), self.slug)
        else:
            return "/{0}/".format(self.slug)

    def get_absolute_url_format(self):
        if self.parent_id:
            return "{0}{{slug}}/".format(self.parent.get_absolute_url())
        else:
            return "/{slug}/"

For a blog, you can add the /blog/{year}/{month}/ format too:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.db import models
from django.utils.timezone import now
from slug_preview.models import SlugPreviewField

class Article(models.Model):
    slug = SlugPreviewField(_("Slug"))
    pubdate = models.DateTimeField(default=now)
    # ...


    def get_absolute_url(self):
        root = reverse('article_list')
        return "{root}/{year}/{month}/{slug}/".format(
            root=reverse('article_list').rstrip('/'),
            year=self.pubdate..strftime('%Y'),
            monthy=self.pubdate..strftime('%M'),
            slug=self.slug
        )

    def get_absolute_url_format(self):
        root = reverse('article_list')
        pubdate = self.pubdate or now()
        return "{root}/{year}/{month}/{{slug}}/".format(
            root=reverse('article_list').rstrip('/'),
            year=pubdate.strftime('%Y'),
            monthy=pubdate.strftime('%M'),
        )

Improving this package

This module is designed to be usable for other projects too. In case there is anything you didn’t like about it, or think it’s not flexible enough, please let us know. We’d love to improve it! Pull requests are welcome too. :-)