How do I form a URL in Django for what I'm doing

Question

Desperate, please help. Will work for food :)

I want to be able to have pages at the following URLs, and I want to be able to look them up by their URL (ie, If somebody goes to a certain URL, I want to be able to check for a page there).

mysite.com/somepage/somesubpage/somesubsubpage/
mysite.com/somepage/somesubpage/anothersubpage/
mysite.com/somepage/somesubpage/somesubpage/
mysite.com/somepage/somepage/

Notice I want to be able to reuse each page's slug (ie, somepage/somepage). Of course each slug will be unique for it's level (ie, cannot have two pages with mysite.com/somepage/other/ and mysite.com/somepage/other/ because they would in essence be the same page). What is a good way to do this. I've tried to store the slug for a page ('somesubpage') in a field called 'slug', and make each slug unique for it's parent page so that the above circumstance can't happen. The problem with this is that if I try to look up a page by it's slug (ie, 'somepage'), and there happens to be a page at mysite.com/other/somepage/ and mysite.com/page/somepage/, how would my application know which one to get (they both have the same slug 'somepage').

Answer 1

You need to also store level and parent attributes, so that you can always get the right object.

The requirement to store hierarchical data comes up very frequently, and I always recommend django-mptt. It's the Django implementation of an efficient algorithm for storing hierarchical data in a database. I've used it on several projects. Basically, as well as storing level and parent, it also stores a left and right for each object, so that it can describe the tree and all its sub-elements uniquely. There are some explanatory links on the project's home page.

Answer 2

It sounds like you're looking for a CMS app. There's a comparison of several Django-based CMS. If you want a full-featured CMS at the center of your project, DjangoCMS 2 or django-page-cms might be the right fit. If you prefer a CMS that supports the basic CMS use cases but goes out of your way most of the time feincms could be something to look at.

edit: incidentally, most of the CMS on the comparision page use django-mptt that Daniel mentions.