Versioning database content with django-reversion

The following steps should be followed to integrate the page module with django-reversion:

  • Add 'reversion' to the list of installed applications.
  • Add 'reversion.middleware.RevisionMiddleware' to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.
  • Call Page.register_with_reversion(**kwargs) after all content types have been created (after all create_content_type invocations). You can optionally supply kwargs that will be passed to reversion.register().
  • Add FEINCMS_USE_PAGE_ADMIN = False to your settings file.

Now, you need to create your own model admin subclass inheriting from both FeinCMS’ PageAdmin and from reversions VersionAdmin:

from django.contrib import admin
from feincms.module.page.models import Page
from feincms.module.page.modeladmins import PageAdmin
from reversion.admin import VersionAdmin

class VersionedPageAdmin(PageAdmin, VersionAdmin):
    pass

admin.site.register(Page, VersionedPageAdmin)

The VersionedPageAdmin does not look like the ItemEditor – it’s just raw Django inlines, without any additional JavaScript. Patches are welcome, but the basic functionality needed for versioning page content is there.

Finally, you should ensure that initial revisions are created using django-reversion’s createinitialrevisions management command.

Note

You should ensure that you’re using a reversion release which is compatible with your installed Django version. The reversion documentation contains an up-to-date list of compatible releases.

The reversion support in FeinCMS requires at least django-reversion 1.6.

Note

Only the Page module is versioned. MediaFiles are not. If a user deletes an image from the MediaLibrary by accident it cannot be recovered. Furthermore, if the position of a page has been moved within the tree, the recovery will break the tree structure. You can try to fix it using the rebuild_mptt command.