Expose content at a URL (app hooks)

Setting apphook = True on a content model’s CMSConfig generates a CMS app hook with a ready-made detail view. This page documents exactly what gets generated, the URL it produces, and the contract your template must follow.

Enabling the app hook

class ArticleContent(AbstractCustomContent):
    article = models.ForeignKey(Article, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    slug = models.SlugField()
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    body = models.TextField()

    class CMSConfig:
        apphook = True

Then attach it to a page: in the CMS page admin, open Advanced settings and select the app hook (named after the grouper, e.g. “Article”), and publish.

What gets generated

  • A detail view — a Django DetailView over the content model.

  • The URL is <slug>/ when the content model has a slug field, and <pk>/ otherwise. Its route name is detail within an application namespace named after the grouper, lowercased (e.g. article).

  • A get_absolute_url() method is injected onto the content model (unless it already defines one). Prefer it over hand-writing {% url %} tags:

    <a href="{{ articlecontent.get_absolute_url }}">{{ articlecontent.title }}</a>

    The equivalent explicit reversal is {% url 'article:detail' slug=obj.slug %}.

The template contract

Two render paths can use your template, and they expose the content object under its (lowercased) model name — so use that variable for portability:

Render path

Context variables

Template chosen

App hook detail view

<modelname> and object

<app_label>/<modelname>_detail.html

Frontend-editing render

<modelname> only

content.get_template() (same default)

For ArticleContent in app my_content that means the variable articlecontent and the template my_content/templates/my_content/articlecontent_detail.html:

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% load cms_tags %}

{% block content %}
    {% cms_edit_on %}
    <article>
        <h1>{{ articlecontent.title }}</h1>
        <div>{{ articlecontent.body|safe }}</div>
    </article>
    {% cms_edit_off %}
{% endblock %}

Note

Use articlecontent, not object — object is only present on the app-hook detail view, so a template that relies on it renders blank during frontend editing.

Overriding the template name

AbstractCustomContent.get_template() returns <app_label>/<modelname>_detail.html by default. Overriding it changes the template used by the frontend-editing render only; the app-hook detail view still resolves its template from the model’s template_name_suffix (_detail). To keep both paths on one template, override get_template and name the file to match, or simply use the default convention.

See Also