Customizing django-comments-tree

django-comments-tree can be extended in the same way as django-contrib-comments. There are three points to observe:

  1. The setting COMMENTS_APP must be 'django_comments_tree'.

  2. The setting COMMENTS_TREE_MODEL must be your model class name, i.e.: 'mycomments.models.MyComment'.

  3. The setting COMMENTS_TREE_FORM_CLASS must be your form class name, i.e.: 'mycomments.forms.MyCommentForm'.

In addition to that, write an admin.py module to see the new comment class in the admin interface. Inherit from django_commensts_xtd.admin.TreeCommentsAdmin. You might want to add your new comment fields to the comment list view, by rewriting the list_display attribute of your admin class. Or change the details view customizing the fieldsets attribute.

Custom Comments Demo

The demo site custom_comments available with the source code in GitHub (directory django_comments_tree\demos\custom_comments) implements a sample Django project with comments that extend django_comments_tree with an additional field, a title.

settings Module

The settings.py module contains the following customizations:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
  # ...
  'django_comments_tree',
  'django_comments',
  'articles',
  'mycomments',
  # ...
)

COMMENTS_APP = "django_comments_tree"
COMMENTS_TREE_MODEL = 'mycomments.models.MyComment'
COMMENTS_TREE_FORM_CLASS = 'mycomments.forms.MyCommentForm'

models Module

The new class MyComment extends django_comments_tree’s TreeComment with a title field:

from django.db import models
from django_comments_tree.models import TreeComment


class MyComment(TreeComment):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=256)

forms Module

The forms module extends TreeCommentForm and rewrites the method get_comment_create_data:

from django import forms
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from django_comments_tree.forms import TreeCommentForm
from django_comments_tree.models import TmpTreeComment


class MyCommentForm(TreeCommentForm):
    title = forms.CharField(
        max_length=256,
        widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': _('title')})
    )

    def get_comment_create_data(self):
        data = super(MyCommentForm, self).get_comment_create_data()
        data.update({'title': self.cleaned_data['title']})
        return data

admin Module

The admin module provides a new class MyCommentAdmin that inherits from TreeCommentsAdmin and customize some of its attributes to include the new field title:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from django_comments_tree.admin import TreeCommentsAdmin
from custom_comments.mycomments.models import MyComment


class MyCommentAdmin(TreeCommentsAdmin):
    list_display = ('thread_level', 'title', 'cid', 'name', 'content_type',
                    'object_pk', 'submit_date', 'followup', 'is_public',
                    'is_removed')
    list_display_links = ('cid', 'title')
    fieldsets = (
        (None,          {'fields': ('content_type', 'object_pk', 'site')}),
        (_('Content'),  {'fields': ('title', 'user', 'user_name', 'user_email',
                                  'user_url', 'comment', 'followup')}),
        (_('Metadata'), {'fields': ('submit_date', 'ip_address',
                                    'is_public', 'is_removed')}),
    )

admin.site.register(MyComment, MyCommentAdmin)

Templates

You will need to customize the following templates:

  • comments/form.html to include new fields.

  • comments/preview.html to preview new fields.

  • django_comments_tree/email_confirmation_request.{txt|html} to add the new fields to the confirmation request, if it was necessary. This demo overrides them to include the title field in the mail.

  • django_comments_tree/comments_tree.html to show the new field when displaying the comments. If your project doesn’t allow nested comments you can use either this template or comments/list.html`.

  • django_comments_tree/reply.html to show the new field when displaying the comment the user is replying to.

Modifying comments with code

Here’s an example of how to access the underlying model storing your comments:

from django_comments_tree.models import TreeComment
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType

def unbsubscribe_everyone(model_instance):
    content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(model_instance)

    TreeComment.objects\
        .filter(content_type=content_type, object_pk=model_instance.pk)\
        .update(followup=False)