Django Categories

Django Categories grew out of our need to provide a basic hierarchical taxonomy management system that multiple applications could use independently or in concert.

As a news site, our stories, photos, and other content get divided into "sections" and we wanted all the apps to use the same set of sections. As our needs grew, the Django Categories grew in the functionality it gave to category handling within web pages.

Features of the project

Currently incompatible with Python 3.10.

Multiple trees, or a single tree. You can treat all the records as a single tree, shared by all the applications. You can also treat each of the top level records as individual trees, for different apps or uses.

Easy handling of hierarchical data. We use Django MPTT to manage the data efficiently and provide the extra access functions.

Easy importation of data. Import a tree or trees of space- or tab-indented data with a Django management command.

Metadata for better SEO on web pages Include all the metadata you want for easy inclusion on web pages.

Link uncategorized objects to a category Attach any number of objects to a category, even if the objects themselves aren't categorized.

Hierarchical Admin Shows the data in typical tree form with disclosure triangles

Template Helpers Easy ways for displaying the tree data in templates:

• Show one level of a tree. All root categories or just children of a specified category

• Show multiple levels. Ancestors of category, category and all children of category or a category and its children

Changes

New in 1.8

• Support for Django 3.1
• Removed support for Python 2.7

New in 1.7

• Support for Django 3

New in 1.6

• Support for Django 2

New in 1.5

• Support for Django 1.10

New in 1.4

• Support for Python 2.7, 3.4 and 3.5
• Support for Django 1.9
• Dropped support for Django 1.7 and older

New in 1.3

• Support for Django 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8
• Dropped support for Django versions 1.5 and below

New in 1.2

• Support for Django 1.5
• Dropped support for Django 1.2
• Dropped caching within the app
• Removed the old settings compatibility layer. Must use new dictionary-based settings!

New in 1.1

• Fixed a cosmetic bug in the Django 1.4 admin. Action checkboxes now only appear once.

• Template tags are refactored to allow easy use of any model derived from CategoryBase.

• Improved test suite.

• Improved some of the documentation.

Upgrade path from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3

Due to some data corruption with 1.0.2 migrations, a partially new set of migrations has been written in 1.0.3; and this will cause issues for users on 1.0.2 version. There is also an issue with South version 0.7.4. South version 0.7.3 or 0.7.5 or greater works fine.

For a clean upgrade from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3 you have to delete previous version of 0010 migration (named 0010_changed_category_relation.py) and fakes the new 00010, 0011 and 0012.

Therefore after installing new version of django-categories, for each project to upgrade you should execute the following commans in order

python manage.py migrate categories 0010_add_field_categoryrelation_category --fake --delete-ghost-migrations
python manage.py migrate categories 0011_move_category_fks --fake
python manage.py migrate categories 0012_remove_story_field --fake
python manage.py migrate categories 0013_null_category_id

This way both the exact database layout and migration history is restored between the two installation paths (new installation from 1.0.3 and upgrade from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3).

Last migration is needed to set the correct null value for category_id field when upgrading from 1.0.2 while is a noop for 1.0.3.

New in 1.0

Abstract Base Class for generic hierarchical category models. When you want a multiple types of categories and don't want them all part of the same model, you can now easily create new models by subclassing CategoryBase. You can also add additional metadata as necessary.

Your model's can subclass CategoryBaseAdminForm and CategoryBaseAdmin to get the hierarchical management in the admin.

See the docs for more information.

Increased the default caching time on views. The default setting for CACHE_VIEW_LENGTH was 0, which means it would tell the browser to never cache the page. It is now 600, which is the default for CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS

Updated for use with Django-MPTT 0.5. Just a few tweaks.

Initial compatibility with Django 1.4. More is coming, but at least it works.

Slug transliteration for non-ASCII characters. A new setting, SLUG_TRANSLITERATOR, allows you to specify a function for converting the non-ASCII characters to ASCII characters before the slugification. Works great with Unidecode.

Updated in 0.8.8

The editor app was placed inside the categories app, categories.editor, to avoid any name clashes.

Upgrading

A setting change is all that is needed:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'categories',
    'categories.editor',
)

New in 0.8

Added an active field. As an alternative to deleting categories, you can make them inactive.

Also added a manager method active() to query only the active categories and added Admin Actions to activate or deactivate an item.

Improved import. Previously the import saved items in the reverse order to the imported file. Now them import in order.

New in 0.7

Added South migrations. All the previous SQL scripts have been converted to South migrations.

Can add category fields via management command (and South). The new ability to setup category relationships in settings.py works fine if you are starting from scratch, but not if you want to add it after you have set up the database. Now there is a management command to make sure all the correct fields and tables are created.

Added an alternate_url field. This allows the specification of a URL that is not derived from the category hierarchy.

New JAVASCRIPT_URL setting. This allows some customization of the genericcollections.js file.

New get_latest_objects_by_category template tag. This will do pretty much what it says.

New in 0.6

Class-based views. Works great with Django 1.3 or django-cbv

New Settings infrastructure. To be more like the Django project, we are migrating from individual CATEGORIES_* settings to a dictionary named CATEGORIES_SETTINGS. Use of the previous settings will still work but will generate a DeprecationError.

The tree's initially expanded state is now configurable. EDITOR_TREE_INITIAL_STATE allows a collapsed or expanded value. The default is collapsed.

Optional Thumbnail field. Have a thumbnail for each category!

"Categorize" models in settings. Now you don't have to modify the model to add a Category relationship. Use the new settings to "wire" categories to different models.