Follow these steps to convert a usual movies Django app to a Django CMS app:

1. First of all, remove or comment out the inclusion of the URL configuration of the app, as it will be included by apphook in Django CMS, as follows:

# myproject/urls.py
# ...
urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    # remove or comment out the inclusion of app's urls
    # path("movies/", include("movies.urls")),
    # ...
]

2. Create a cms_apps.py file in the movies directory and create MoviesApphook there, as follows:

# movies/cms_apps.py
from cms.app_base import CMSApp
from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _


@apphook_pool.register
class MoviesApphook(CMSApp):
    app_name = "movies"
    name = _("Movies")

    def get_urls(self, page=None, language=None, **kwargs):
        return ["movies.urls"]

3. By default, the CMS will automatically discover your apphooks by searching each app in INSTALLED_APPS for the preceding magic file. If you only want to wire in specific apps instead, you can set the newly created apphook in the CMS_APPHOOKS settings, as shown in the following code:

# settings.py or config/base.py
CMS_APPHOOKS = (
    # ...
    "movies.cms_apps.MoviesApphook",
)

4. Finally, in all of the movie templates, change the first line to extend from the template of the current CMS page, instead of extending base.html, as follows:

{# templates/movies/movies_list.html #}
{% comment %}
Change {% extends "base.html" %} to: {% endcomment %}
{% extends CMS_TEMPLATE %}