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Usage¶

The application can enable TinyMCE for one form field using the widget keyword argument of Field constructors or for all textareas on a page using a view.

Using the widget¶

If you use the widget (recommended) you need to add some python code and possibly modify your template.

Python code¶

The TinyMCE widget can be enabled by setting it as the widget for a formfield. For example, to use a nice big TinyMCE widget for the content field of a flatpage form you could use the following code:

from django import forms
from django.contrib.flatpages.models import FlatPage
from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE

class FlatPageForm(ModelForm):
    ...
    content = forms.CharField(widget=TinyMCE(attrs={'cols': 80, 'rows': 30}))
    ...

    class Meta:
        model = FlatPage

The widget accepts the following keyword arguments:

mce_attrs (default: {}): Extra TinyMCE configuration options. Options from settings.TINYMCE_DEFAULT_CONFIG (see Configuration) are applied first and can be overridden. Python types are automatically converted to Javascript types, using standard JSON encoding. For example, to disable word wrapping you would include 'nowrap': True.
content_language (default: django.utils.translation.get_language_code()): The language of the widget content. Will be used to set the language, directionality and spellchecker_languages configuration options of the TinyMCE editor. It may be different from the interface language (changed using language in mce_attrs) which defaults to the current Django language.

Templates¶

The widget requires a link to the TinyMCE javascript code. The django.contrib.admin templates do this for you automatically, so if you are just using tinymce in admin forms then you are done. In your own templates containing a TinyMCE widget you must add the following to the HTML HEAD section (assuming you named your form ‘form’):

<head>
    ...
    {{ form.media }}
</head>

See also the section of form media in the Django documentation.

The `HTMLField` model field type¶

For lazy developers the tinymce application also contains a model field type for storing HTML. It uses the TinyMCE widget to render its form field. In this example, the admin will render the my_field field using the TinyMCE widget:

from django.db import models
from tinymce import models as tinymce_models

class MyModel(models.Model):
    my_field = tinymce_models.HTMLField()

In all other regards, HTMLField behaves just like the standard Django TextField field type.

Using the view¶

If you cannot or will not change the widget on a form you can also use the tinymce-js named view to convert some or all textfields on a page to TinyMCE editors. On the template of the page, add the following lines to the HEAD element:

<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}js/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="{% url tinymce-js "NAME" %}"></script>

The NAME argument allows you to create multiple TinyMCE configurations. Now create a template containing the Javascript initialization code. It should be placed in the template path as NAME/tinymce_textareas.js or tinymce/NAME_textareas.js.

Example:

tinyMCE.init({
    mode: "textareas",
    theme: "advanced",
    plugins: "spellchecker,directionality,paste,searchreplace",
    language: "{{ language }}",
    directionality: "{{ directionality }}",
    spellchecker_languages : "{{ spellchecker_languages }}",
    spellchecker_rpc_url : "{{ spellchecker_rpc_url }}"
});

This example also shows the variables you can use in the template. The language variables are based on the current Django language. If the content language is different from the interface language use the tinymce-js-lang view which takes a language (LANG_CODE) argument:

<script type="text/javascript" src="{% url tinymce-js-lang "NAME","LANG_CODE" %}"></script>

External link and image lists¶

The TinyMCE link and image dialogs can be enhanced with a predefined list of links and images. These entries are filled using a variable loaded from an external Javascript location. The tinymce application can serve these lists for you.

Creating external link and image views¶

To use a predefined link list, add the external_link_list_url option to the mce_attrs keyword argument to the widget (or the template if you use the view). The value is a URL that points to a view that fills a list of 2-tuples (name, URL) and calls tinymce.views.render_to_link_list. For example:

Create the widget:

from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE

class SomeModel(models.Model):
    somefield = forms.CharField(widget=TinyMCE(mce_attrs={'external_link_list_url': reverse('someapp.views.someview')})

Create the view:

from tinymce.views import render_to_link_list

def someview(request):
    objects = ...
    link_list = [(unicode(obj), obj.get_absolute_url()) for obj in objects]
    return render_to_link_list(link_list)

Finally, include the view in your URLconf.

Image lists work exactly the same way, just use the TinyMCE external_image_list_url configuration option and call tinymce.views.render_to_image_list from your view.

The `flatpages_link_list` view¶

As an example, the tinymce application contains a predefined view that lists all django.contrib.flatpages objects: tinymce.views.flatpages_link_list. If you want to use a TinyMCE widget for the flatpages content field with a predefined list of other flatpages in the link dialog you could use something like this:

from django import forms
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.contrib.flatpages.admin import FlatPageAdmin
from django.contrib.flatpages.models import FlatPage
from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE

class TinyMCEFlatPageAdmin(FlatPageAdmin):
    def formfield_for_dbfield(self, db_field, **kwargs):
        if db_field.name == 'content':
            return forms.CharField(widget=TinyMCE(
                attrs={'cols': 80, 'rows': 30},
                mce_attrs={'external_link_list_url': reverse('tinymce.views.flatpages_link_list')},
            ))
        return super(TinyMCEFlatPageAdmin, self).formfield_for_dbfield(db_field, **kwargs)

somesite.register(FlatPage, TinyMCEFlatPageAdmin)

If you want to enable this for the default admin site (django.contrib.admin.site) you will need to unregister the original ModelAdmin class for flatpages first:

from django.contrib import admin

admin.site.unregister(FlatPage)
admin.site.register(FlatPage, TinyMCEFlatPageAdmin)

The source contains a test project that includes this flatpages model admin. You just need to add the TinyMCE javascript code.

Checkout the test project: svn checkout http://django-tinymce.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/testtinymce
Copy the tiny_mce directory from the TinyMCE distribution into media/js
Run python manage.py syncdb
Run python manage.py runserver
Connect to http://localhost:8000/admin/

The TinyMCE preview button¶

TinyMCE contains a preview plugin that can be used to allow the user to view the contents of the editor in the website context. The tinymce application provides a view and a template tag to make supporting this plugin easier. To use it point the plugin_preview_pageurl configuration to the view named tinymce-preview:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
widget = TinyMCE(mce_attrs={'plugin_preview_pageurl': reverse('tinymce-preview', "NAME")})

The view named by tinymce-preview looks for a template named either tinymce/NAME_preview.html or NAME/tinymce_preview.html. The template accesses the content of the TinyMCE editor by using the tinymce_preview tag:

{% load tinymce_tags %}
<html>
<head>
...
{% tinymce_preview "preview-content" %}
</head>
<body>
...
<div id="preview-content"></div>
...

With this template code the tekst inside the HTML element with id preview-content will be replace by the content of the TinyMCE editor.