django-oscar-blog

A blog app for django-oscar: posts, an Oscar dashboard section under Content, and posts that can link out to catalogue products they mention.

What this package does, and doesn't, do

• A Post model: title/slug/excerpt/body/featured image/author/status (draft/published)/publish date, plus meta_title/meta_description for SEO, a related_products many-to-many onto catalogue.Product, and tags (via django-taggit).
• Storefront list/detail views (oscar_blog.urls) and a PostSitemap.
• An Oscar dashboard section (oscar_blog.dashboard) for staff to create, edit, and delete posts — list/create/update/delete views following the exact same conventions as Oscar's own dashboard.pages app (flatpages), including its permission model (is_staff by default).
• It does not ship a newsletter integration or a "featured products" CTA anywhere in the storefront — see "Adding a CTA" below. The related-products picker defaults to a plain multi-select but has an opt-in AJAX autocomplete mode — see "Related products" below.

Installation

uv add django-oscar-blog

Add to INSTALLED_APPS, after catalogue/partner (it references catalogue.Product) and after oscar.config.Shop:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    "taggit",
    "oscar_blog.apps.OscarBlogConfig",
    "oscar_blog.dashboard.apps.BlogDashboardConfig",
]

Run manage.py migrate — this package ships its own migration.

Wiring the storefront URLs

# urls.py
urlpatterns = [
    path("blog/", include("oscar_blog.urls")),
    ...
]

Templates extend oscar/layout.html under oscar_blog/post_list.html and oscar_blog/post_detail.html — override them the same way you'd override any other Oscar template (a project-level templates/oscar_blog/... directory).

Wiring the dashboard in ("Content" menu)

Oscar's own dashboard.apps.DashboardConfig.get_urls() is a hardcoded list, not auto-discovered — every dashboard section Oscar ships is added there directly, and third-party sections have to fork that config the same way you'd fork any other Oscar app. This package's own test suite (tests/dashboard.py) is a working example of exactly this fork — copy its shape into your project, e.g. a dashboard/apps.py:

from django.apps import apps
from django.urls import include, path
from oscar.apps.dashboard.apps import DashboardConfig as OscarDashboardConfig


class DashboardConfig(OscarDashboardConfig):
    def ready(self):
        super().ready()
        self.blog_app = apps.get_app_config("blog_dashboard")

    def get_urls(self):
        urls = super().get_urls()
        urls.append(path("blog/", include(self.blog_app.urls[0])))
        return urls

...and swap "oscar.apps.dashboard.apps.DashboardConfig" for your project's own "yourproject.dashboard.apps.DashboardConfig" in INSTALLED_APPS.

Then add the nav entry under Content, alongside Pages/Email templates/Reviews, by overriding OSCAR_DASHBOARD_NAVIGATION (a plain Django setting — copy Oscar's default from oscar.defaults and insert):

{
    "label": _("Blog posts"),
    "url_name": "dashboard:blog-post-list",
},

into the "Content" entry's "children" list.

Related products

Post.related_products is a plain (unordered) ManyToManyField onto catalogue.Product. A published post's detail page lists them under "Mentioned products", linking to each product's own page (post_detail.html). Nothing on the Product side surfaces "posts that mention me" yet — the reverse relation is available as product.blog_posts.all() if a host project wants to add that to a product page.

Dashboard picker widget — two modes, one setting:

OSCAR_BLOG_PRODUCT_AUTOCOMPLETE = True  # default: False

• Off (default): a plain <select multiple> with every product rendered as an <option>. Fine at a small catalogue's scale; at real scale every dashboard post-edit page load pulls in the whole catalogue.
• On: the dashboard's related-products field switches to Oscar's own oscar.apps.dashboard.catalogue.widgets.ProductSelectMultiple — a Select2 widget backed by Oscar's already-installed dashboard:catalogue-product-lookup endpoint (oscar.apps.dashboard.catalogue.views.ProductLookupView, a real title__icontains search, already staff-permission-gated). Only the currently selected products are pre-rendered; everything else loads as the user types. No new backend endpoint needed — this project's dashboard/forms.py just wires Oscar's existing one in, plus one real fix Oscar itself doesn't apply consistently: ProductSelectMultiple needs an explicit class="select2 product-select" to actually get AJAX-backed search (confirmed against oscar/static/oscar/js/oscar/dashboard.js's initSelects() — without it, the field would still render, just silently degraded to searching only the few options already in the page).

Requires oscar.apps.dashboard.catalogue installed (it almost certainly already is — it's the products dashboard). If it isn't, turning this setting on will fail with a NoReverseMatch on dashboard:catalogue-product-lookup, not silently.

Tags

Uses django-taggit directly (BSD-licensed) rather than a hand-rolled tag model — Post.tags is a TaggableManager, editable in the dashboard as a plain comma-separated field (taggit's own default widget, no extra code needed). Tags are shared across posts (the same tag name is the same Tag row everywhere, not per-post free text), and the storefront list view supports ?tag=<slug> filtering — both oscar_blog/post_list.html and post_detail.html render each post's tags as links to that filtered list. Run manage.py migrate after adding taggit to INSTALLED_APPS — it ships its own migrations for the shared Tag/TaggedItem tables.

Adding a CTA (deliberately not built here)

This package intentionally ships no newsletter-subscribe or "promote this product" call-to-action anywhere in its templates — that's host-project UI/UX scope (placement, copy, branding), not something a reusable blog app should assume. If your project adds one, the natural places are oscar_blog/post_list.html/post_detail.html (override them) or a custom template tag included from there.

Translations

The package ships a Spanish translation (src/oscar_blog/locale/es/). Both the .po source and the compiled .mo are committed, so the wheel includes the .mo and nothing needs compiling on install. After editing a .po, recompile before releasing:

msgfmt -o src/oscar_blog/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/django.mo \
    src/oscar_blog/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/django.po

New strings are extracted with django-admin makemessages -l es run from src/oscar_blog/. A project can override any single string in its own LOCALE_PATHS without copying the whole catalogue.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest

tests/settings.py boots a full (stock) Oscar app stack — this package genuinely depends on Oscar's catalogue models, unlike a framework-agnostic library, so its tests can't run against bare Django alone.