Frequently Asked Questions

Templates

The templates does not fit to my wishes. What can I do ?

The templates provided for Zinnia are simple but complete and as generic as possible. But you can easily change them by specifying a template directory. If you are not familiar with Django, the part two of the excellent Django tutorial explains in detail how to proceed for customizing the look and feel of the admin app, in Zinnia it’s the same thing.

A good starting point is to copy-paste the zinnia/base.html template, and edit the extends instruction for fitting to your skin.

Note

  • The main content is displayed in block named content.
  • Additional datas are displayed in a block named sidebar.

You can also create your own app containing some Zinnia’s templates based on inheritance. You can also create your own app containing some Zinnia’s templates based on inheritance. For example you can find these two applications which aim is to transform the templates for Zinnia to be HTML5 ready, which can be a good starting point to make your own at :

Warning

Changed in version 0.9.

Django Blog Quintet is no longer compatible with Zinnia, but still be a good example.

Comments

Is it possible have a different comment system, with reply feature for example ?

Yes the comment system integrated in Zinnia is based on django.contrib.comments and can be extended or replaced if doesn’t quite fit your needs. You should take a look on the customizing the comments framework documentation for more information.

Warning

The custom comment Model must be inherited from Comment and implement the CommentManager to properly work with Zinnia.

If you want the ability to reply on comments, you can take a look at django-threadcomments for example.

Edition

I want to write my entries in MarkDown, RestructuredText or any lightweight markup language, is it possible ?

Yes of course, Zinnia currently support MarkDown, Textile and reStructuredText as markup languages, but if you want to write your entries in a custom markup language a solution is to disable the WYSIWYG editor in the admin site with the ZINNIA_WYSIWYG setting, and use the appropriate template filter in your templates.

Authors

Is Zinnia able to allow multiple users to edit it’s own blog ?

Zinnia is designed to be multi-site. That’s mean you can publish entries on several sites or share an admin interface for all the sites handled.

Zinnia also provides a new permission that’s allow or not the user to change the authors. Useful for collaborative works.

But if you want to restrict the edition of the entries by site, authors or whatever you want, it’s your job to implement this functionality in your project.

The simple way to do that, respecting the Django rules, is to override the admin classes provided by Zinnia, and register those classes in another admin site.

Images

How can I use the image field for fitting to my skin ?

Take a looks at sorl.thumbnail and use his templatetags.

You can do something like this in your templates :

<img src="{% thumbnail object.image 250x250 %}" />