.. _faq:

==========================

Frequently Asked Questions

==========================

This FAQ serves two purposes. Firstly, it does what a FAQ generally does --

answer frequently asked questions. Secondly, it is also a place to dump

fragments of documentation which haven't matured enough to be moved into

their own documentation file.

Should I extend the builtin modules and contents, or should I write my own?

===========================================================================

The answer is, as often, the nearly useless "It depends". The built-in modules

serve two purposes: On one hand, they should be ready to use and demonstrate

the power of FeinCMS. On the other hand, they should be simple enough to serve

as examples for you if you want to build your own CMS-like system using the

tools provided by FeinCMS.

If a proposed feature greatly enhances the modules' or content types'

abilities without adding heaps of code, chances are pretty good that it will

be accepted into FeinCMS core. Anyway, the tools included should be so easy

to use that you might still want to build your own page CMS, if your needs

are very different from those of the original authors. If you don't like

monkey patching at all, or if the list of extensions you want to use grows

too big, it might be time to reconsider whether you really want to use the

extension mechanism or if it might not be easier to start freshly, only

using the editor admin classes, feincms.models.Base and maybe parts of the

included PageManager...

I get a ``mptt.AlreadyRegistered`` exception when I try using the :mod:`~feincms.module.page` module!

=====================================================================================================

This happens when the Django model loading code encounters an ``ImportError``

when it loads the :mod:`~feincms.module.page` module for the first time. The

module is added to a list of postponed modules, and the import is retried

after all other applications have been successfully imported. This will

cause the ``mptt.register`` call to be executed twice though, which is why

you see this exception. We could catch this exception and go on as if

nothing had happened, but this hides a deeper problem somewhere which should

be fixed for good instead of papering over the issue.

There are several ways how you might find out what's going wrong. Raise the

debugging level, try importing the page module (and other modules) from the

shell you get when you use ``./manage.py shell`` are some possibilities how

you might debug this problem.

I run ``syncdb`` and get a message about missing columns in the page table

==========================================================================

You enabled the page module (added :mod:`feincms.module.page` to

``INSTALLED_APPS``), run syncdb, and afterwards registered a few

extensions. The extensions you activated

(:mod:`~feincms.module.page.extensions.datepublisher` and

:mod:`~feincms.module.page.extensions.translations`) add new fields to

the page model, but your first ``syncdb`` did not know about them and

therefore did not create the columns for those extensions.

You can either remove the line ``Page.register_extensions(...)`` from

your code or drop the page_page table and re-run ``syncdb``. If you want

to keep the pages you've already created, you need to figure out the

correct ALTER TABLE statements for your database yourself.