Help requested with creating custom home page

[Sreini]

Hello,

First of all I would like to thank the creators for the cool software they put together. After struggling a little bit to put everything together I now am starting to grasp some of the ideas behind it and have a working website.

However, I now want to create a custom home page where my latest articles show up in a "news website" look. So, the "most important" article will have a headline format, and then other articles underneath it will show up in a more toned down way etc etc.

The best strategy for this seems to be based on this question I found: #530

In short, it is to create a custom "Latest Pages" block template. The advantages of this is that I would be using mostly pre-existing functionality.

However, I don't want just any article to show up in the headline. I was thinking of letting my editors use a "Headline" classifier term to point out what articles they want in the headline.

However, I also don't want only those articles showing up in the headline. Therefore what I would actually want to achieve is the following:

1. Load the x latest articles
2. sort these articles so that the articles with the "Headline" classifier go to the top (because If there are not enough "Headline" articles recently I still want my home page to show recent articles, i.e I don't want ONLY "headline" articles).
3. display these pages in my own custom way

The step I'm unsure of is mostly number 2. I do not know how to do that.

So my questions are:

• Is my thinking sound? Or should I use some other strategy?
• If it is sound, how can I achieve this effect the best way?

Edit: I guess what I'm asking is: how do I add a custom ordering of pages based on a classifier term?

[Sreini]

After typing everything out I realize this literally already exists but I had missunderstood what it did. In fact, it does exactly what I'm asking for here:

[vsalvino]

Great! Yes there is a lot of power in the classifier system, unfortunately it is not very well documented. We need more "how-to" guides to help expose some of these features.

[Sreini]

Actually after trying this a bit more I'm struck with one issue. How would I go about it if i want to have one "Latest Articles" block where I follow the ordering of a classifier, and then in another "Latest Pages" block I do not. Concretely I want to have one block where I have my headlines, and another where I have a "news stream" where news articles appear exclusively in the order which they were published. However all my articles are children of my one "Articles" page.

What do you recommend I do in this case?

[Sreini]

@vsalvino tagging you in case you hadn't seen this.

I'd be open to making a pull request if this is not possible, if we discuss the design and the how and what.

[Sreini]

class PageListWithOrderOverrideBlock(PageListBlock):
    """
    Latest Page Preview block that allows user to override parent page ordering
    """

    override_order = blocks.BooleanBlock(
        required=False,
        default=False,
        label=_("Override parent ordering with first published date"),
    )

    class Meta:
        template = "coderedcms/blocks/pagelist_block.html"
        icon = "list-ul"
        label = _("Latest Pages with Override Ordering")

    def get_context(self, value, parent_context=None):

        context = super().get_context(value, parent_context=parent_context)

        indexer = value["indexed_by"].specific
        # try to use the CoderedPage `get_index_children()`,
        # but fall back to get_children if this is a non-CoderedPage
        if hasattr(indexer, "get_index_children"):
            pages = indexer.get_index_children()
            if value["classified_by"]:
                try:
                    pages = pages.filter(
                        classifier_terms=value["classified_by"]
                    )
                except AttributeError:
                    # `pages` is not a queryset, or is not a queryset of CoderedPage.
                    logger.warning(
                        (
                            "Tried to filter by ClassifierTerm in PageListBlock, "
                            "but <%s.%s ('%s')>.get_index_children() "
                            "did not return a queryset or is not a queryset of "
                            "CoderedPage models."
                        ),
                        indexer._meta.app_label,
                        indexer.__class__.__name__,
                        indexer.title,
                    )
        else:
            pages = indexer.get_children().live()

        if self.override_order:
            pages = pages.order_by("-first_published_at")
        context["pages"] = pages[: value["num_posts"]]
        return context

I have added a new block that will hopefully fix this issue. However, even if I run migrations, I do not seem to be able to select this block. Is there anything else I need to do?

[Sreini]

I got this working thanks to finally (after reading through a lot of the code) understanding this issue and the solution inside of it: #305

However I feel like my use case is quite common, so I wonder if me making a pull request to change the existing PageListBlock would be appreciated?