Django CMS is an open source content management system that is based on Django and was created by Divio AG, Switzerland. Django CMS takes care of a website's structure, provides navigation menus, makes it easy to edit page content in the frontend, and supports using multiple languages on a website. You can also extend it to suit your own needs by using the provided hooks. To create a website, you have to create a hierarchical structure of pages, where each page has a template. Templates have placeholders that can be assigned different plugins with the content. Using special template tags, the menus can be generated out of the hierarchical page structure. The CMS takes care of mapping URLs to specific pages.

In this chapter, we will look at Django CMS 3.6 from a developer's perspective. You will see what is necessary for the templates to function, and we will take a look at the possible page structure for header and footer navigation. You will also learn how to attach the URL rules of an app to a CMS page tree node. Then, we will attach custom navigation to the page menu and create our own CMS content plugins. Finally, you will learn how to add new fields to the CMS pages.

In this book, we won't guide you through all of the bits and pieces of using Django CMS, but by the end of this chapter, you will be aware of its purpose and use. The rest can be learned from the official documentation at http://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/, and by trying out the frontend user interface of the CMS.