[GeoNode-users] Geonode and Django Content Management System

Tue Jul 5 09:58:14 PDT 2016

David, It might be good to send a PR with this info against the docs
around here.

https://github.com/GeoNode/geonode/tree/72f44cd66636fa0bf3494cf5003d1e5dcf206b93/docs/tutorials/admin

On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 12:21 AM, David Kennewell
<david.kennewell at hydrata.com> wrote:
> OK, for posterity I thought I'd report back on my experience integrating
> Geonode version 2.4.dev20160701231044 and django-cms v3.3. It seems to be
> working well for me, although still early days and I have no test suite so
> I'm expecting a few bugs yet.
>
> Given that this touches Apache, urls, dependencies outside of pip, and the
> base templates, I don't really have an understanding about how to turn it
> into a contrib app. But hopefully this will help the discussion if other
> wise folk end up going down a similar path.
>
>
> 1. Firstly, you really need an automated build environment for this. Python
> virtualenv won't save you from dependency hell, as many of the dependencies
> for each are system-wide libraries. I'm using a system-wide install, using a
> fresh instance each time. It will depend on how you customise DjangoCMS.
> Here's what worked for me:
>
> #DjangoCMS dependencies
> sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools python-pip -y
> sudo apt-get install -y libqd-dev libpq-dev
> sudo apt-get install -y libtiff5-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev
> libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.6-dev tk8.6-dev python-tk
>
> #Geonode dependencies
> sudo apt-get install -y python-virtualenv build-essential openssh-server
> apache2 gcc gdal-bin gettext git-core libapache2-mod-wsgi \
>     libgeos-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libpq-dev libproj-dev libxml2-dev
> libxslt-dev openjdk-7-jre patch postgresql postgis
> postgresql-9.3-postgis-scripts \
>     postgresql-contrib python python-dev python-gdal python-pycurl
> python-imaging python-pastescript python-psycopg2 python-support
> python-urlgrabber \
>     python-virtualenv tomcat7 unzip zip
>
>
> The good old PIL/pillow challenges came up again during this process, but
> the above works for me to resolve that.
>
> 2. I installed geonode generally in accordance with this
> http://docs.geonode.org/en/master/tutorials/install_and_admin/geonode_install/index.html
> And DjangoCMS generally in accordance with this
> http://docs.django-cms.org/en/release-3.3.x/how_to/install.html Note to get
> fuller functionality of DjangoCMS you might want to set up a separate
> install using django-cms-installer and then replicate INSTALLED_APPS and
> dependencies into your project. The vanilla CMS installed by hand is very
> vanilla.
>
> 3. The ordering of INSTALLED_APPS is very important and takes some time and
> rebuilds to get right. I found it very useful to have a standalone postgres
> database (not using the one that geonode spins up on localhost), to save me
> migrating models every time I tried a new build.
>
> Here's what works for me:
>
> https://gist.github.com/davekennewell/d4f99670396707f9ec9ec2c9636ddc08
>
> 4. Regarding Internationalisation, in ~/geonode/geonode/urls.py I simply
> overrode the
>
> from django.conf.urls import include, patterns, url
>
> from django.conf.urls.i18n import i18n_patterns as patterns
>
> This means that all your geonode webpages will now look like this:
> http://myawesomesite.com/en/layers or http://myawesomesite.com/hi/layers
> which in my case is fine because we may need the internationalisation later
> anyway. But having that extra language code might be a pain for others.
>
> But importantly now the CMS urls can simply add on as an include at the end
> of geonode's urlpatterns:
>
> url(r'^', include('cms.urls')),
>
>
> 5. DjangoCMS uses django-filer & easythumbnails to allow upload & storage of
> images. It needs to store these in a manner similar to geonode's
> ~/geonode/geonode/uploaded/thumbs directory. So you'll need to create
>
> ~/geonode/geonode/uploaded/filer_public
> ~/geonode/geonode/uploaded/filer_public_thumbnails/filer_public
>
> and set the permissions and apache configuration similar to the thumbs
> directory.
>
> 6. The real design work to make any of this useful is in merging the
> templates and template tags. There's a bunch of choices here that are
> specific for each usecase. I'd really recommend understanding how these work
> in vanilla DjangoCMS before trying to merge them into your geonode project.
> It's nothing super difficult, but there are many moving parts and I've had
> to learn a lot here by using CMS independently, before I would even know
> where to start.
>
> OK, that's about it for now. If anyone is headed down this path, I'd be
> happy to compare notes & thanks again Jesus for you work - it helped me a
> lot.
>
> cheers
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>
>
> David Kennewell
> Water Resources Engineer
> Hydrata.com
> +971 55 409 7378
> david.kennewell at hydrata.com
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 11:57 AM, David Kennewell
> <david.kennewell at hydrata.com> wrote:
>>
>> That's some great work Jesús, thanks. It's always reassuring knowing that
>> a task is possible before you set out! Let me know when you've got a blog
>> post up - I'd be interested to see how it looks & understand the user
>> experience a bit more.
>>
>> It looks like I'm going to go ahead with the integration for my site -
>> I'll pay attention to the challenges you've highlighted there, and let you
>> know how I get on with them.
>>
>> I also note you're using django-cms==3.1.5.It's the latest CMS version
>> (3.3) that has dropped support for django 1.6 & 1.7. I'll test out both
>> options and figure out a way forward. My preference will be to use geonode
>> master & djangocms3.3, to avail future upgrades, but we'll see if it works.
>> It will be useful having your code to track the differences.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Jesús <gesusjl at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I have succesfully integrated django-cms and geonode for a project
>>> currently available at darwinfoundation.org/geoportal or
>>> geoportal.darwinfoundation.org . Hope we can start uploading data and blog
>>> posts soon. We have an internal geonode with layers, maps, and posts as part
>>> of the workflow.
>>>
>>> There's plenty of space for further development but i needed to stop at
>>> some point to cover other tasks.
>>>
>>> Current version of django-cms use django 1.6 and has been installed
>>> manually. I have integrated djangocms-blog for multilingual post and a wiki
>>> system also.
>>>
>>> I didn't touch the models nor views so we can benefit from geonode
>>> project development . I have not developed geonode django-cms plugins but
>>> should be easy enough to integrated them on geonode.
>>>
>>> For already published maps i use iframes to embed them on posts. The
>>> workflow is quite simple. Users publish maps and editors can use those maps
>>> among other resources to publish stories.
>>>
>>> I found no problem related with the auth system so far. Admins can use
>>> the group app to give permissions to advance users.
>>>
>>> The code needs cleaning and would benefit from refactoring but you can
>>> take a look at
>>> https://github.com/jesusjl/cdfgeonode/tree/2.4.x-geonode-1.0.0.
>>>
>>> It's just a geonode template with customizations.
>>>
>>>
>>> Some challenges i found on the path...
>>>
>>> Internationalization: I had problems with the way geonode and django-cms
>>> manage internationalization. As far as i know django-cms use parler... So
>>> with some hacks i was able to use both ways to handle this topic. I had a
>>> lot of problems by the way geonode handle layers and maps urls, mostly 404
>>> errors.
>>>
>>> Javascript: i had some javascript error difficult to debug when allowing
>>> geonode pages be controlled by django-cms, but i was able to use
>>> placeholders at the homepage. Care should be taken anyway.
>>>
>>> Url: I was expecting to use django i18n patterns to handle geonode urls
>>> as part of django-cms but it became really cumbersome. So i just import
>>> geonode url and include django-cms urls at the end. See internalization for
>>> the purpose on it.
>>>
>>> Probably someone with more django experience could surpass all this
>>> difficulties. Im sure that integrating django-cms on geonode would leverage
>>> the project to a new level and probably it is worth the investment.
>>>
>>> Hope i can help within my means and would love to hear more on this
>>> topic.
>>>
>>> Jesus
>>>
>>> 2016-06-23 1:53 GMT-06:00 David Kennewell <david.kennewell at hydrata.com>:
>>>>
>>>> Hi there Geonode users,
>>>>
>>>> I wanted to share a few developments we've made with Geonode and
>>>> DjangoCMS, and learn if there are others in the community headed in this
>>>> direction.
>>>>
>>>> For those not familiar with django-cms it's a tool that allows users to
>>>> edit and publish content directly to a website through their browser. No
>>>> coding or web developer required. A typical usecase would be a reporting
>>>> publishing an article to her newspaper website.
>>>>
>>>> I've been working with an NGO in Chennai,India to improve the
>>>> accessibility of their work around flood management, and have found the CMS
>>>> a really useful tool to merge reports and Geonode spatial data together in a
>>>> way that readers can engage with. Here's an example:
>>>>
>>>> http://chennaifloodmanagement.org/en/projects/cag-flood-inundation-mapping/
>>>>
>>>> To achieve this outcome, there's basically two steps. I'd be interested
>>>> in collaborating with anyone who would like to get involved in either of
>>>> these.
>>>>
>>>> 1. Integrating Geonode with DjangoCMS
>>>> Current status:
>>>> I've bolted these two together with sticky tape and paper glue to
>>>> demonstrate what might be possible on the Chennai project :) Currently I'm
>>>> running two separate servers & databases, with hardcoded links in each
>>>> project to make it look like it's all talking to each other. Apart from the
>>>> dev headache, major drawback here is that users need two django accounts,
>>>> one for editing reports in CMS and another for geonode. Yuk.
>>>>
>>>> Desired status:
>>>> Integrate DjangoCMS as an app under geonode. Now that geonode is running
>>>> on Django 1.8 this is should be possible. If I do go down this path (we
>>>> still need some decent traction here to justify it) I'd really appreciate
>>>> some guidance on how to do this in a manner that allows both easy
>>>> integration for other projects, but acknowledges that this isn't the core
>>>> use-case for geonode, so should be an optional extra (in my opinion).
>>>>
>>>> 2. Authoring geonode maps within DjangoCMS content editor.
>>>> Once you're geonode/CMS webapp is up and running, your users still need
>>>> to be able to publish geonode maps from the CMS editor. I've written a
>>>> plugin to enable this. Once again, it's bare-bones, but it works and we find
>>>> it useful. I've pushed the code to github here:
>>>> https://github.com/Hydrata/geonode_cms_map
>>>> I'd be happy to write an install doc for this, but that's probably not
>>>> useful until I resolve the above integration issues. Until then it's a
>>>> manual deploy - feel free to reach out if you would like guidance and we can
>>>> work through together - I'm sure I'd learn something from this too.
>>>>
>>>> That's it from me for now, I'd love to hear any similar stories or
>>>> use-cases that might help guide this development in a way that's useful for
>>>> all.
>>>>
>>>> thanks
>>>>
>>>> David Kennewell
>>>> Water Resources Engineer
>>>> Hydrata.com
>>>> +971 55 409 7378
>>>> david.kennewell at hydrata.com
>>>> https://ae.linkedin.com/in/davekennewell
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> geonode-users mailing list
>>>> geonode-users at lists.osgeo.org
>>>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geonode-users
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jesús
>>
>>
>
>
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