How do you make a Django app pluggable?

Question

Say for example I have a Blog app that I want to be able to drop into different projects, but I always want the Blog to be associated with some other model. For example, in one case I may want it to be associated with a user:

site.com/someuser/blog

But on another site I want it to be associated with, say, a school:

site.com/someschool/blog

Is there a way to make the Blog app pluggable so that it's not necessary to redefine the model (adding a foreign key field) whenever I drop it into a project?

check last django conference for talk on pluggable apps – yesraaj May 04 '09 at 06:40 — yesraaj, May 04 '09 at 06:40

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered May 04 '09 at 06:14

6

There are several important details for making sure an app can be reusable and I think it's best to link to two of the more important sets of documentation on the topic:

answered May 04 '09 at 06:14

Van Gale

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score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 04 '09 at 15:39

You might want to look into the ContentTypes framework, I used it to create a comment app that can be used for commenting any model in the database (for different reasons, I didn't want to use the standard django comment app).

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/contenttypes/

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 19 '11 at 13:39

3

Generic relationships allow you to have a foreign key to any other model. However it's not clear from your question what type of object you want a foreign key to link to. I suspect that foreign key relationship isn't really generic - you just haven't spotted another part of your system that could also be a reusable app.

edited Oct 19 '11 at 13:39

Dave Forgac

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answered May 04 '09 at 13:23

Andy Baker

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How do you make a Django app pluggable?

3 Answers3