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Markup handling (using Jay Salvat's MarkItUp! flexible universal markup editor) for Django

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django-markitup

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A Django reusable application for end-to-end markup handling. Includes:

  • Easy integration of the MarkItUp! markup editor widget (by Jay Salvat) in Django projects, with server-side support for MarkItUp!'s AJAX preview. Plug in MarkItUp! via form widget or template tags.
  • MarkupField, a TextField that automatically renders and stores both its raw and rendered values in the database, on the assumption that disk space is cheaper than CPU cycles in a web application.

Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install django-markitup

To use django-markitup in your Django project:

  1. Add 'markitup' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
  2. Make the contents of the markitup/static/markitup directory available at STATIC_URL/markitup; the simplest way is via django.contrib.staticfiles.
  3. Set the MARKITUP_FILTER setting.
  4. If you want to use AJAX-based preview, add
    url(r'^markitup/', include('markitup.urls')) in your root URLconf.

Dependencies

django-markitup 4.1.x requires Django 2.2 or later and Python 3.5+.

django-markitup 4.0.x requires Django 1.11 or later and Python 3.5+.

django-markitup 3.x requires Django 1.8 or later and Python 2.7+ or 3.4+.

django-markitup 2.x requires Django 1.4 or later and Python 2.6+ or 3.3+.

django-markitup 1.x requires Django 1.3 or later and Python 2.5 or later.

MarkItUp! is not an external dependency; it is bundled with django-markitup.

Using the MarkItUp! widget

The MarkItUp! widget lives at markitup.widgets.MarkItUpWidget, and can be used like any other Django custom widget.

To assign it to a form field:

from markitup.widgets import MarkItUpWidget

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    content = forms.CharField(widget=MarkItUpWidget())

When this form is displayed on your site, you must include the form media somewhere on the page using {{ form.media }}, or the MarkItUpWidget will have no effect. By default {{ form.media }} also includes the jQuery library based on your JQUERY_URL setting. To prevent including jQuery, set the JQUERY_URL setting to None.

MarkItUpWidget accepts three optional keyword arguments: markitup_set and markitup_skin (see Choosing a MarkItUp! button set and skin) and auto_preview (to override the value of the MARKITUP_AUTO_PREVIEW setting).

To use the widget in the Django admin:

from markitup.widgets import AdminMarkItUpWidget

class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    content = forms.CharField(widget=AdminMarkItUpWidget())
    # ...

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = MyModelForm
    # ...

You can also use the formfield_overrides attribute of the ModelAdmin, which is simpler but only allows setting the widget per field type (so it isn't possible to use the MarkItUpWidget on one TextField in a model and not another):

from markitup.widgets import AdminMarkItUpWidget

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    formfield_overrides = {models.TextField: {'widget': AdminMarkItUpWidget}}
If you use MarkupField in your model, it is rendered in the admin
with an AdminMarkItUpWidget by default.

Using MarkItUp! via templatetags

In some cases it may be inconvenient to use MarkItUpWidget (for instance, if the form in question is defined in third-party code). For these cases, django-markitup provides template tags to achieve the same effect purely in templates.

First, load the django-markitup template tag library:

{% load markitup_tags %}

Then include the MarkItUp! CSS and Javascript in the <head> of your page:

{% markitup_media %}

By default the markitup_media tag also includes jQuery, based on the value of your JQUERY_URL setting, with a fallback to the version hosted at Google Ajax APIs. To suppress the inclusion of jQuery (if you are already including it yourself), set the JQUERY_URL setting to None.

If you prefer to link CSS and Javascript from different locations, the markitup_media tag can be replaced with two separate tags, markitup_css and markitup_js. markitup_js accepts a parameter to suppress jQuery inclusion, just like markitup_media.

Last, use the markitup_editor template tag to apply the MarkItUp! editor to a textarea in your page. It accepts one argument, the HTML id of the textarea. If you are rendering the textarea in the usual way via a Django form object, that id value is available as form.fieldname.auto_id:

{{ form.fieldname }}

{% markitup_editor form.fieldname.auto_id %}

You can use markitup_editor on as many different textareas as you like.

markitup_editor accepts an optional second parameter, which can be either "auto_preview" or "no_auto_preview" to override the value of the MARKITUP_AUTO_PREVIEW setting.

The actual HTML included by these templatetags is defined by the contents of the templates markitup/include_css.html, markitup/include_js.html, and markitup/editor.html. You can override these templates in your project and customize them however you wish.

MarkupField

You can apply the MarkItUp! editor control to any textarea using the above techniques, and handle the markup on the server side however you prefer.

For a seamless markup-handling solution, django-markitup also provides a MarkupField model field that automatically renders and stores both its raw and rendered values in the database, using the value of the MARKITUP_FILTER setting to parse the markup into HTML.

A MarkupField is easy to add to any model definition:

from django.db import models
from markitup.fields import MarkupField

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    body = MarkupField()

MarkupField automatically creates an extra non-editable field _body_rendered to store the rendered markup. This field doesn't need to be accessed directly; see below.

Accessing a MarkupField on a model

When accessing an attribute of a model that was declared as a MarkupField, a Markup object is returned. The Markup object has two attributes:

raw:
The unrendered markup.
rendered:
The rendered HTML version of raw (read-only).

This object also has a __unicode__ method that calls django.utils.safestring.mark_safe on rendered, allowing MarkupField attributes to appear in templates as rendered HTML without any special template tag or having to access rendered directly.

Assuming the Article model above:

>>> a = Article.objects.all()[0]
>>> a.body.raw
'*fancy*'
>>> a.body.rendered
'<p><em>fancy</em></p>'
>>> print(unicode(a.body))
<p><em>fancy</em></p>
>>> a.body.render_with('markitup.renderers.render_rest')
>>> print(unicode(a.body))
'<div class="document">\n<p><em>fancy</em></p>\n</div>\n'

Assignment to a.body is equivalent to assignment to a.body.raw.

Note

a.body.rendered is only updated when a.save() or a.body.render_with() is called

Editing a MarkupField in a form

When editing a MarkupField model attribute in a ModelForm (i.e. in the Django admin), you'll generally want to edit the original markup and not the rendered HTML. Because the Markup object returns rendered HTML from its __unicode__ method, it's necessary to use the MarkupTextarea widget from the markupfield.widgets module, which knows to return the raw markup instead.

By default, a MarkupField uses the MarkItUp! editor control in the admin (via the provided AdminMarkItUpWidget), but a plain MarkupTextarea in other forms. If you wish to use the MarkItUp! editor with this MarkupField in your own form, you'll need to use the provided MarkItUpWidget rather than MarkupTextarea.

If you apply your own custom widget to the form field representing a MarkupField, your widget must either inherit from MarkupTextarea or its render method must convert its value argument to value.raw.

Choosing a MarkItUp! button set and skin

MarkItUp! allows the toolbar button-set to be customized in a Javascript settings file. By default, django-markitup uses the "default" set (meant for HTML editing). Django-markitup also includes basic "markdown" and "textile" sets (these are available from the MarkItUp site), as well as a "restructuredtext" set.

To use an alternate set, assign the MARKITUP_SET setting a URL path (absolute or relative to STATIC_URL) to the set directory. For instance, to use the "markdown" set included with django-markitup:

MARKITUP_SET = 'markitup/sets/markdown/'

MarkItUp! skins can be specified in a similar manner. Both "simple" and "markitup" skins are included, by default "simple" is used. To use the "markitup" skin instead:

MARKITUP_SKIN = 'markitup/skins/markitup/'

Neither of these settings has to refer to a location inside django-markitup's media. You can define your own sets and skins and store them anywhere, as long as you set the MARKITUP_SET and MARKITUP_SKIN settings to the appropriate URLs.

Set and skin may also be chosen on a per-widget basis by passing the markitup_set and markitup_skin keyword arguments to MarkItUpWidget.

Using AJAX preview

If you've included markitup.urls in your root URLconf (as demonstrated above under Installation), all you need to enable server-side AJAX preview is the MARKITUP_FILTER setting.

The rendered HTML content is displayed in the Ajax preview wrapped by an HTML page generated by the markitup/preview.html template; you can override this template in your project and customize the preview output.

Note

Using the MarkItUpWidget or markitup_editor template tag will automatically set the previewParserPath in your MarkItUp! set to reverse('markitup_preview'), if markitup.urls is included in your URLconf.

The MARKITUP_FILTER setting

The MARKITUP_FILTER setting defines how markup is transformed into HTML on your site. This setting is only required if you are using MarkupField or MarkItUp! AJAX preview.

MARKITUP_FILTER must be a two-tuple. The first element must be a string, the Python dotted path to a markup filter function. This function should accept markup as its first argument and return HTML. It may accept other keyword arguments as well. You may parse your markup using any method you choose, as long as you can wrap it in a function that meets these criteria.

The second element must be a dictionary of keyword arguments to pass to the filter function. The dictionary may be empty.

For example, if you have python-markdown installed, you could use it like this:

MARKITUP_FILTER = ('markdown.markdown', {})

Alternatively, you could use the "textile" filter provided by the django-markwhat library like this:

MARKITUP_FILTER = ('django_markwhat.templatetags.markup.textile', {})

(The textile filter function doesn't accept keyword arguments, so the kwargs dictionary must be empty in this case.)

django-markitup provides one sample rendering function, render_rest in the markitup.renderers module.

Avoiding Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks

If your site is displaying user-provided markup to the world, then there is some risk of users injecting malicious <script> tags (or similar) into their markup text, that your site will then render in its HTML pages. Any filter that passes through HTML unmodified (e.g. python-markdown) is especially at-risk, here.

This can be mitigated by running the rendered HTML through the bleach library, e.g:

MARKITUP_FILTER = ('my_lib.bleached_markdown', {})

Where my_lib contains:

import bleach
from bleach_allowlist import markdown_tags, markdown_attrs
from markdown import markdown

def bleached_markdown(text, **kwargs):
    markdown_rendered = markdown(text, **kwargs)
    bleached = bleach.clean(markdown_rendered, markdown_tags, markdown_attrs)
    return bleached

render_markup template filter

If you have set the MARKITUP_FILTER setting and use the MarkItUp! AJAX preview, but don't wish to store rendered markup in the database with MarkupField (or are using third-party models that don't use MarkupField), you may want a convenient way to render content in your templates using your MARKITUP_FILTER function. For this you can use the render_markup template filter:

{% load markitup_tags %}

{{ post.content|render_markup }}

Other settings

MARKITUP_PREVIEW_FILTER

This optional setting can be used to override the markup filter used for the Ajax preview view, if for some reason you need it to be different from the filter used for rendering markup in a MarkupField. It has the same format as MARKITUP_FILTER; by default it is set equal to MARKITUP_FILTER.

MARKITUP_AUTO_PREVIEW

If set to True, the preview window will be activated by default. Defaults to False.

JQUERY_URL

MarkItUp! requires the jQuery Javascript library. By default, django-markitup links to jQuery 2.0.3 at ajax.googleapis.com (via the URL //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js). If you wish to use a different version of jQuery, or host it yourself, set the JQUERY_URL setting. For example:

JQUERY_URL = 'jquery.min.js'

This will use the jQuery available at STATIC_URL/jquery.min.js. A relative JQUERY_URL is relative to STATIC_URL.

If you include the jQuery library manually in your templates and don't want django-markitup to include it, set JQUERY_URL to None.