Getting Started

When working with components in djangocms-frontend, you can choose from different approaches depending on your needs. These range from using built-in Bootstrap 5 components, over quick and simple methods to create your own custom frontend components to more flexible but complex solutions. We recommend staying with the simplest approach that gets the job done for your project.

  1. Built-in Bootstrap 5 Components – The easiest way to get started with djangocms-frontend. Built-in components are ready to use and require no additional configuration. They are perfect for quickly setting up a website with a variety of components that are compatible with Bootstrap 5. Pre-built components need to be explicitly added to your project’s INSTALLED_APPS.

  2. Template Components – The easiest approach creating or porting your own custom components, allowing you to define them by their HTML templates, without any code. Special djangocms-frontend tags are used to provide the additional declarative information needed. This is the fastest approach to create djangocms-frontend components. Template-based (or auto) components are auto-detected.

  3. Custom Frontend Component development – A more advanced method that lets you create custom components with minimal code. This approach is more flexible than the template-based method, but requires some Python coding providing more control over the components add and change forms, for example.

  4. Custom Plugin Development – The most advanced option, where you create fully-fledged custom plugins, giving you maximum control over functionality, rendering, and integration with other parts of your project. This approach is the most flexible, but also the most complex, since template, plugin, and forms need to be created. For custom plugin development, see the How to add your own frontend plugin guide.

Start with one of the following tutorials: