Tutorial

A guided walkthrough that builds a small, real-looking django CMS site from an empty project. You will end up with a marketing site for a fictional coffee roaster — a few editable pages, a custom plugin, and a catalogue mounted via an apphook.

The tutorial is structured for someone who:

• has used Django at the level of the official Django tutorial,

• has never (or barely) used django CMS,

• wants to feel productive within an hour.

Plan to spend roughly 30 minutes reading and 60 minutes typing for the whole sequence. Each chapter ends with something you can see in the browser.

Conventions

• The Explanation section answers why. This tutorial does not.

• The Reference section is the authoritative API. This tutorial cites it but never reproduces it.

• The How-to guides section covers production concerns (caching, multi-language, deployment, headless). This tutorial does not.

When something in the tutorial feels too small, that is on purpose. The goal is to finish a working site, not to enumerate every option.

The chapters

• Installing django CMS
• Your first page
• Templates and placeholders
• A custom plugin
• Mount a Django app with an apphook
• Make it look like a site
• Where to go next

What you will build

By the end of chapter 5 your project will contain:

• an About page and a Home page authored in django CMS’ frontend editing interface,

• a custom plugin called Coffee card that editors can drop into any placeholder,

• a coffeeshop Django app exposing a catalogue at /menu/, mounted on a CMS page through an apphook,

• a navigation menu and minimal styling so the site reads as a site rather than an admin demo.

If you get stuck, the django CMS community is on Discord.