Adding WYSIWYG editor to Django Project

Often, to manage content efficiently we use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which stores our content in html and is also helpful to upload images, creating links, lists and works almost like WordPress editor. This article is in continuation of Blog CMS Project in Django. Check this out here – Building Blog CMS (Content Management System) with Django

How to add WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)  editor to Django Project?

1. Install summernote – 

# installing wysiwyg editor
pip3 install django-summernote

2. Add the editor to installed apps in the settings file

Python3

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    # adding in installed apps
    'django_summernote',

]

3. Migrate the project

# migrate django summernote
python3 manage.py migrate

4.Customize admin interface – 

Now we will customize the admin interface for the app. For that open the admin.py file and add the below code

Python3

# importing admin and posts model
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import posts
from django_summernote.admin import SummernoteModelAdmin

# creating admin class
class blogadmin(SummernoteModelAdmin):
    # displaying posts with title slug and created time
    list_display = ('title', 'slug', 'status', 'created_on')
    list_filter = ("status", )
    search_fields = ['title', 'content']
    # prepopulating slug from title
    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ('title', )}
    summernote_fields = ('content', )

# registering admin class
admin.site.register(posts, blogadmin)

5. Adding media setting for our editor

Open your python settings file and add these lines

Python3

# add it in settings.py
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'media/')

# allows to load iframe from same hostname
X_FRAME_OPTIONS = 'SAMEORIGIN'

The editor works well in production but for the development server it won’t work because of the way the static files load so to make that work we need to add a condition in django projects urls.py

Python3

# add condition in django urls file
if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root = settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

6. Customizing Admin Page – 

Django also gives the option to customize Admin page, we will do an minimal customization of changing the name from django default to GeeksForGeeks. go to urls.py file in django project and add these lines

Python3

# customizing admin interface
admin.site.site_header = 'GeeksForGeeks'
admin.site.site_title = 'GeeksForGeeks'
admin.site.index_title = 'GeeksForGeeks Administration'

urlpatterns = [
......
 # urls handling WYSIWYG editor
    path('editor/', include('django_summernote.urls')),
......
]

Now run the server and login into admin panel using the superuser credentials. You will see something like in the below picture. So we have created and customized admin class for creating, managing and listing posts for our CMS with custom admin login.

7. Output Screenshots – 

Custom Admin Login

listing posts

editor for posts