Blog
_This post assumes your project is currently using Mezzanine 3.1.10 and up to date with South migrations._ To get started install Mezzanine 4 into a fresh virtualenv and create a Mezzanine 4 project. $ virtualenv MEZ4 $ source MEZ4/bin/active $ pip install mezzanine $ mezzanine-project mez4proj We will refer to `mez4proj` throughout the process of upgrading your project to Mezzanine 4. As I write…
I recently was working on a project in which I was making use of Cartridge and needed to collect extra info when users added particular products to their order. I wanted this to be toggleable via the backend so that certain products would require extra information and others wouldn't. My particular case was collecting a student ID, but these techniques should be applicable to many use cases. After…
## The process 1. Sign up for [Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=8b6cb2deb3cc) (that's a referral link which you are in no way obligated to use) 2. Create a droplet (I've added my SSH key to Digital Ocean so I assign that to the droplet). I used Debian 7 x64 3. Point your domain's A record at the IP address Digital Ocean assigns to your droplet. 4. Log into the vps as root,…
## The problem Recently while working on developing a Mezzanine powered site I was asked to make it possible to edit the footer in the Mezzanine admin. In this case the footer contained a block of text that was contact info and two blocks that were links, some within the site, some external. In the past I've created a `ContentBlock` model that is just a title and `RichTextField`. I then have…
This is the fourth and final part of my tutorial series on creating Mezzanine themes. Throughout the tutorial I have been going over the process of taking static html and using it to develop a Mezzanine theme. I've been working with the html template that is available [here](http://www.templatescreme.com/free-website-jessica-white-free-bootstrap-website), but the methods I discuss could be used to…
This is the third post in my series on creating themes for Mezzanine. [Part 1](/blog/mezzatheming-creating-mezzanine-themes-part-1-basehtml/) went over setting up base.html to provide a consistent header and footer across the whole site. [Part 2](/blog/mezzatheming-part-2-the-homepage/) covered adding your home page to Mezzanine's CMS. In this post I will describe the process that I use to style…
This is the second post in a series of posts on how I create Mezzanine themes. These posts are a walkthrough of how I take an html template (the one I am using is freely available [here](http://www.templatescreme.com/free-website-jessica-white-free-bootstrap-website), and turn it into a fully functional Mezzanine site. I would recommend starting with the [first…
This is the first part of a series of blog posts that describes the process that I use to create themes for Mezzanine. In this case you will be following along as I create the theme [Lucid](https://mezzathe.me/theme/lucid/), which you can purchase on [MEZZaTHEME](http://mezzathe.me). Lucid is based on the responsive Twitter Bootstrap template that you can find…
I recently integrated [Django Sendfile][1] with a website to provide downloads that required authentication (even knowing the location of an authentication requiring file in the static directory will not allow you to download it thanks to some Apache conf magic). That was all well and good, but a result was that it was no longer possible to download those files through the admin interface using…
I was working on further developing a website that is built in Mezzanine and needed to completely disable the built in comments. As far as I know there is no setting that controls this so I wanted to figure out the easiest/most efficient way to do this. Obviously I could go through every template that used the comments_for template tag and remove it (removing the comment form from the associated…
A question that often comes up on the Mezzanine mailing list is "how can I make Mezzanine do x". Modifying Mezzanine's code directly is an option but that will make upgrading Mezzanine painful. Below I discuss a number of techniques that can be used to modify Mezzanine without actually touching Mezzanine's codebase. ## Monkey Patching In case you are unfamiliar, Wikipedia defines a monkey patch as…
I was working on developing a [Mezzanine](http://mezzanine.jupo.org) site where a desired feature was to allow marking BlogPosts as login required, the same way that Pages can be marked as login required. After implenting a solution I decided it would be nice to document it for myself, and anyone else who is interested. ## The code A prerequisite to the following code is creating a django app.…
I was recently working on a project that required combining a Django model and another model related to it via a ForeignKey in a single form. At first I considered generating fields for the related model in the ModelForm's init, the more I thought about it though, the more I realized that would be messy, brittle and not easy to make changes to in the future. ## The Solution Turns out you can put a…
I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to make an EmailField unique. The problem was that the field had blank set to True so the field couldn't be unique because when testing uniqueness Django (and AFAIK the underlying databases) consider '' to match ''. This is differnet than when you have null=True as well because django and the underlying database do not consider None and None to be a…