Markup Plugin API

At its core, cmsplugin-markup is built around the idea of markup plugins which can implement different markup implementation for parsing user input. By default it comes with Markdown, reST and Textile plugins available in the cmsplugin_markup/plugins/ directory.

Specifiying Available Plugins

To determine which markup plugins are available to the user, cmsplugin-markup looks for a setting CMS_MARKUP_OPTIONS. It expects this to be a tuple in this format:

CMS_MARKUP_OPTIONS = (
    'cmsplugin_markup.plugins.markdown',
    'cmsplugin_markup.plugins.textile',
    'cmsplugin_markup.plugins.restructuredtext',
)

Each entry should be a string and should be a complete path to a Python module that contains the plugin.

You can also configure what is a default value for markups which support dynamically rendered output, using CMS_MARKUP_RENDER_ALWAYS setting (by default True).

API

To be used as a markup plugin, a Python module must contain a class that defines required methods and attributes. This class must be named Markup. For example:

from cmsplugin_markup.plugins import MarkupBase

class Markup(MarkupBase):
    name = 'Human Readable Name for Plugin'
    identifier = 'internal-plugin-identifier'

    def parse(self, value, context=None, placeholder=None):
        return value

This barebones class contains all the required pieces to work.

The name variable is a human readable name and may be of any length. This is the name that will be presented to the user as the option to choose the markup language from.

The identifier variable is stored as a CharField and anything that is allowed in a CharField is allowed in this. It must be unique across all the installed markup plugins and may be at most 20 characters long.

The parse function must accept self, and a value argument. It must accept also possible Django template rendering context and current placeholder. Those are given when rendering markup every time the page is displayed is enabled; to give more information about the context and location in which they are rendered. This function is where you will implement the actual rendering of user’s input.

There are some additional methods and an attribute if markup supports adding text plugins. In this case text_enabled_plugins class attribute should be set to True and the following methods should be defined.

plugin_id_list(self, text) should return the list of plugins inserted and currently used in the markup text.

replace_plugins(self, text, id_dict) should replace references to plugins in the markup text with new ids.

plugin_markup(self) should return JavaScript code for anonymous function which construct plugin markup given plugin_id, icon_src and icon_alt arguments. It should be marked as safe to prevent escaping.

plugin_regexp(self) should return JavaScript code for anonymous function which construct plugin regexp given plugin_id. It should be marked as safe to prevent escaping.

Some markups support dynamically rendered output (like macros) which could be rendered every time differently. If your markup supports this you can set is_dynamic to True and this will then give users an option to enable rendering of the content every time the page (markup plugin) is displayed (default value is configured by CMS_MARKUP_RENDER_ALWAYS setting). Otherwise the content is rendered only once, when saved.