Changelog

Change log

Next version

9.0 (2026-06-12)

• Dropped support for Django versions older than 4.2. This is a prerequisite for modernizing the content editor JavaScript, since Django only switched the formset:added / formset:removed events to native CustomEvent instances in Django 4.1.

• Restructured the content editor JavaScript into native ES modules, split by concern (context, regions/rights, order machine, drag and drop, sections, cloning) with a single central initialization. The modules are loaded through an import map so that hashed static file storage keeps working. Bumped the django-js-asset dependency so that we can use the new import map utilities.

• Removed the jQuery dependency from the content editor JavaScript; it is now vanilla JavaScript. jQuery is only still used as the DOM-ready hook so that initialization runs after Django’s admin inline setup.

• Backwards incompatible: the content-editor:activate and content-editor:deactivate events are now native CustomEvent instances. The affected inline is passed as event.detail.inline (a DOM element) and the plugin’s formset prefix as event.detail.prefix, instead of the inline being a second, jQuery-wrapped handler argument. See the quickstart guide for how to write listeners that support both the old and the new behavior.

• Fixed a rights handling bug: it was possible to add plugins to an instance that has no regions at all. Adding now requires a valid, non-unknown region.

8.1 (2026-02-05)

• Fixed the ordering calculation when cloning content: The gap for the new cloned content already had the correct size, but the base ordering value was incorrect.

• Fixed the ordering calculation again.

• Added role="button" to plugin buttons to avoid link styles.

• Added testing using Django 6.0 and Python 3.14.

• Added a Django system check (with INFO severity) to detect non-abstract base classes when creating plugins. The check does not warn about proxy models since they are expected to inherit from non-abstract base classes.

8.0 (2025-08-25)

• Implemented cloning of plugins between regions.

• Replaced the plugin expanding and collapsing animation with a version for modern browsers.

• Made the content editor region tabs stick to the top of the browser window when scrolling down.

• Saved the editor state in the URL instead of using session storage because this allows loading a specific region explicitly.

• Fixed a bug where the section highlighting was broken when the the last plugin in a region wasn’t visible at all.

• Refactored the JavaScript a bit, it’s still ugly though.

7.4 (2025-07-02)

• Introduced RefinedModelAdmin as a lightweight base class providing common admin enhancements (currently save shortcuts). The ContentEditor now inherits from this base class, and RefinedModelAdmin can be used independently for regular model admins that want these tweaks.

• Reorganized the documentation and modified the quickstart section to no longer mention or recommend CKEditor 4.

• Dropped some CSS rules which prevented usage of position: sticky in the admin.

7.3 (2025-06-23)

• Removed mentions of the Template type from the docs and deprecated the class. django-content-editor never used it, only FeinCMS did; feincms3 ships its own TemplateType type replacing it.

• Prepared for the new object-based Script by moving from django-js-asset’s JS to a script without attributes, and moved the configuration into an inline JSON blob.

• Rewrote content_editor/save_shortcut.js without jQuery.

• Added a safety check to save_shortcut.js which shows a confirmation dialog when attempting to delete the whole object instead of deleting only inlines.

7.2 (2025-01-27)

• Added Python 3.13. Removed Python 3.8 and 3.9.

• Added Django 5.2a1.

• Changed Type and therefore also Region and Template to be hashable. This is achieved by hashing the key field (which all existing uses of Type have).

7.1 (2024-10-02)

• Changed the plugin buttons grid to allow collapsing empty rows.

• Disabled dragging plugins when changes are not allowed anyway.

• Stopped collapsing plugin initially when they contain errors.

• Added automatic scrolling while dragging plugins.

• Fixed a bug where a plugin with multiple fieldsets wouldn’t collapse completely.

• Added Django 5.1 to the CI.

• Introduced sections. Content editor inlines can now define a sections attribute; recommended values include 0 (the default), 1 (open one section) and -1 (close one section). Those sections are collapsed and moved as one unit during editing.

• Added a red border to the region dropdown of plugins in unknown regions.

7.0 (2024-05-31)

• Switched from ESLint to biome.

• Completely revamped the plugin buttons control. It now doesn’t take up any place on the side anymore but instead appears when clicking the insertion target.

• Added plugin icons to inlines instead of the generic drag handle.

6.5 (2024-05-16)

• Fixed the content editor initialization: The active region was only set after saving and not initially.

• Removed the maximum height from content editor inlines.

• Started showing the target indicator again when dragging over collapsed plugins.

• Allowed dragging plugins to positions after existing plugins, not just before. This allows dragging a plugin directly to the end, finally.

• Changed the content editor to work better if changing the parent object isn’t allowed. Plugin buttons (which didn’t do anything) are now hidden, and the region tabs work correctly.

• Updated the bundled material icons font.

• Preferred the admin form’s model instance to the original context variable. This lets us pick better content editor defaults.

• Started hiding all plugin buttons when showing an unknown region.

6.4 (2024-02-16)

• Stopped showing plugin buttons if user has no permission to add the plugin.

• Added Python 3.11, Django 4.1 and 4.2 to the CI matrix.

• Removed Django 4.0 from the CI (3.2 is still there).

• Added Type to content_editor.models.__all__ since it is used in feincms3.

• Tweak the plugin button positioning a bit.

• Added padding to form rows in tabbed fieldsets below 767px.

• Switched to hatchling and ruff.

• Started restoring not only the region but also the collapsed state of inlines and the vertical scroll position.

6.3 (2022-04-30)

• Increased the max-height of content editor fieldsets so that stupidly high fieldsets stay completely visible.

• Changed missing icons to a generic extension icon instead of the question mark.

• Added a system check for the regions attribute of content editor inlines. It verifies that the attribute is either None or an iterable.

6.2 (2022-03-04)

• Changed the handling of formset:added and formset:removed for compatibility with Django 4.1.

• POSSIBLY BACKWARDS INCOMPATIBLE: Disallowed region keys which do not have the form of an identifer, e.g. content-main. Such keys cannot be used in templates etc. and are therefore a bad idea.

6.1 (2022-02-17)

• POSSIBLY BACKWARDS INCOMPATIBLE: Disallowed region keys starting with an underscore. It was a bad idea to allow these in the first place and caused some … unnecessary interactions when wrapping Contents in lazy objects.

• Fixed an edge case where multiple machine messages were shown.

• Made it possible to move plugins out of unknown regions even if there is only one valid region at all.

6.0 (2022-01-13)

• Made the inherit_from argument to contents_for_item keyword-only.

• Added an optional regions argument to contents_for_items and contents_for_item which allows passing in a list of Region objects to limit the regions fetched.

• Renamed the undocumented _regions attribute of the Contents object to regions.

5.1 (2021-12-30)

• Added pre-commit.

• Changed the minimum versions to Django 3.2 and Python 3.8.

• Added compatibility with django-jazzmin.

5.0 (2021-12-03)

• Allowed dragging text etc. inside the content editor (made the dragstart handling only trigger when dragging the title of fieldsets).

• Fixed a bug where overlong fieldset titles would cause wrapping, which made the region move dropdown and the deletion UI elements inaccessible.

• Made the submit row sticky in content editors.

• Reworked the machine control to always add plugin buttons for all plugins and removed the plugins dropdown and moved the control to the right hand side of the editor to improve the visibility of plugin labels.

• Made it possible to drag several content blocks at once.

• Made it possible to directly insert plugins in the middle of the content, not just at the end.

• Added a bundled copy of Google’s Material Icons library for use in the editor.

• Stopped overflowing the content editor horizontally when using (very) long descriptions for content blocks.

• Changed the transitions to avoid ugly artefacts when switching regions.

• Stopped merging unknown regions into one tab.

• Fixed one instance of a slightly timing-dependent initialization.

• Added Python 3.10, Django 4.0rc1 to the CI.

4.1 (2021-04-15)

• Fixed the rich text plugin to use the correct selector for the documented JavaScript code.

• Added allow_regions and deny_regions helpers to restrict plugins to specific regions. This was possible before but may be a little bit nicer with those helpers.

• Added a workaround for a Chrome regression where the contents of a collapsed fieldset were still visible. (See the Chromium bug.)

• Fixed an edge case where passing a generator to contents_for_item would cause too many queries because of a missing parent foreign key caching.

• Disabled the content editor when there are no regions or when the current region doesn’t allow any plugins.

• Changed the content editor interface to collapse and expand fieldsets with a single click instead of requiring a totally not discoverable doubleclick.

• Switched to saving the “Collapse all items” state inside the browsers’ localStorage instead of starting with expanded fieldsets every time.

• Changed the JavaScript code to not add history entries anymore when changing tabs.

• Fixed the layout and sizing of controls in the title of heading blocks (the dropdown to move the block to a different region and the delete checkbox).

• Changed the content editor to always add new items in an uncollapsed state.

• Added a workaround for Django admin’s failure to collapse/uncollapse fieldsets which have been added dynamically.

• Changed the “Collapse all items” behavior to never collapse fieldsets with errors inside.

• Changed Region and Template to require all of their fields.

4.0 (2020-11-28)

• BACKWARDS INCOMPATIBLE: Plugins now use the inline prefix inside the content editor. ContentEditor.addPluginButton() now requires the inline prefix of plugins, not an arbitrary key. E.g. instead of <app_label>_<model_name> it now expects <app_label>_<model_name>_set. This change allows using the same plugin model several times with different inlines.

• Allowed configuring plugin buttons by setting the button attribute of ContentEditorInline classes/objects.

• Added highlighting of the current content block in the editor.

• Added focussing of the first input field of new content blocks.

• Added a dragging affordance to content blocks.

• Made hovered and focussed content blocks stand out more.

• Fixed styling problems when using tabbed fieldsets with inlines.

• Fixed a long-standing bug where dropping a content block on top of e.g. a CKEditor instance wouldn’t actually move the dragged block to the new position.

• Changed the JavaScript code to also handle Ctrl-S, not just Cmd-S to save; modified the event handler to always save and continue.

• Replaced the collapse-all button with a checkbox to make it clearer what the state is.

• Allowed collapsing individual content blocks by doubleclicking the title. This may change in the future (as all things) because it’s not discoverable at all.

• Added a small note when a fieldset is collapsed.

• Changed CSS variables to use the same names as django-variable-admin.

• Moved the Ctrl-S and Cmd-S shortcut handling into its own content_editor/save_shortcut.js static file to allow easier reuse in other model admin classes.

• Started modernizing the JavaScript code, dropped Internet Explorer polyfills. Django dropped support for legacy browsers in the administration interface in the Django 3.1 release too.

• Changed the JavaScript code to not swallow unrelated drag/drop events.

3.0 (2020-06-06)

• Added Django 3.0 and 3.1a1 to the test matrix.

• Dropped Django 1.11, 2.0 and 2.1.

• Fixed a problem where the content editor JavaScript code would produce an invalid action upon submit.

2.0 (2019-11-11)

• Changed the minimum versions to Django 1.11 and Python 3.5. Removed the dependency on six again.

• Dropped the contents_for_mptt_item utility.

• Dropped the PluginRenderer – people should really either use feincms3’s TemplatePluginRenderer or implement a project-specific solution.

1.5 (2019-09-26)

• Added an additional check to avoid processing inlines not managed by the content editor.

• Allowed uncollapsing tabbed fieldsets after page load by specifying "classes": ["tabbed", "uncollapse"]

• Added a place to edit items assigned to unknown regions.

1.4 (2019-03-18)

• Added configuration to make running prettier and ESLint easy.

• Added a different message when a region is empty and its inherited flag is set.

• Make the regions attribute on ContentEditorInline objects a callable.

• Added a six dependency, Django 3.0 will ship without @python_2_unicode_compatible.

• Deprecated contents_for_mptt_item and removed the django-mptt dependency from the testsuite.

• Made the dependency of our JS on django.jQuery explicit which is necessary to avoid invalid orderings with Django 2.2 because of its updated Media.merge algorithm.

1.3 (2018-12-10)

• Added back the possibility to move new content blocks in-between other content blocks without having to save first. To achieve this the CSS and JavaScript of the content editor was rewritten using flex ordering instead of modifying the order of elements in the DOM. This also implies that reordering content blocks does not require deactivation and activation steps anymore e.g. to preserve the functionality of a rich text editor, possibly making it easier to implement custom editors for individual plugins.

• Added a button to the content editor to toggle the content of inlines (making reordering contents easier).

• Added a workaround for a bug with Django’s responsive administration panel CSS where form fields where shown below the 767px breakpoint despite them being .hidden.

• Reformatted the CSS and JavaScript code using prettier.

1.2 (2018-10-06)

• Fixed our use of internal API of forms.Media that will be removed in Django 2.0.

• Fixed an elusive bug with our formsets handling. Newly added content blocks have to be saved before they can be reordered.

• Fixed a handful of minor CSS bugs.

• Updated the documentation with a few improved recommendations.

• Moved plugin buttons before the dropdown.

• Removed the JavaScript’s dependency on the exact related_name value of plugins.

1.1 (2017-06-27)

• Moved the JS form assets helper to django-js-asset, thereby raising our own Python code coverage to 100%.

• Added Django 1.11 and Django@master to the Travis build.

• Added a tox configuration file for building docs and running style checks and the test suite.

• Added a check which errors if the model registered with the ContentEditor has no regions attribute or property.

• Expanded the documentation a bit.

• Fixed occasional problems when sorting by keeping the empty inline formsets at the end at all times. Thanks to Tom Van Damme for the contribution!

1.0 (2017-01-23)

• Moved the regions inheritance handling from contents_for_mptt_item to contents_for_item to make it reusable outside MPTT hierarchies.

• Reworded the introduction to the documentation.

0.10 (2016-09-06)

• Changed Region and Template to extend types.SimpleNamespace on Python versions that support this (>3.3)

• Allowed restricting individual plugin types to a subset of available regions by setting ContentEditorInline.plugins to a list of region keys. Thanks to Tom Van Damme for the contribution!

• Removed Django from install_requires – updating django-content-editor does not necessarily mean users want to update Django as well.

0.9 (2016-08-12)

• Some browsers do not support Math.sign…

• Automatically open the first tab with errors when using tabbed fieldsets.

• Improve visibility of plugin fieldsets.

• Fixed widgets using their own size in tabbed fieldsets and the content editor (for example django-versatileimagefield’s primary point of interest field).

• Use django.contrib.staticfiles’ static URL generation if it is installed.

0.8 (2016-07-07)

• Modified PluginRenderer.render and PluginRenderer.render_content to pass on keyword arguments (if any) to the registered render functions.

• Made tabbed fieldsets’ titles stand out if the tab contains invalid fields.

0.7 (2016-06-29)

• Raise tests coverage back to 100% after the PluginRenderer.render change in 0.6.

• Simplify the implementation of the return value of PluginRenderer.render. Empty regions are now falsy again.

0.6 (2016-06-25)

• The return value of PluginRenderer.render now allows outputting individual items as well as the concatenated output of all items as before.

• Added this change log.

0.5 (2016-06-21)

• Made tests using Django@master pass again by switching to my fork of django-mptt.

• Simplified the way package data is specified in setup.py.

0.4 (2016-04-14)

• Added a check to Django’s checks framework for custom content editor fieldsets.

• Streamlined the implementation of PluginRenderer, allow rendering a single plugin.

• Added documentation for Contents and its helpers.

• Added infrastructure for running the tests using ./setup.py test.

0.3 (2016-02-28)

• Replaced the ContentEditorForm with a formfield_for_dbfield override for easier model form customization.

• Replaced the ContentProxy concept with a generic Contents class and various helpers for fetching contents.

• Added a simple PluginRenderer for registering render functions for a plugin class tree.

0.2 (2016-02-26)

• Added comments, documentation.

• Fixed the JavaScript tag generation by the JS class.

• Only auto-fill our own ordering fields.

0.1 (2016-02-16)

Initial public release of django-content-editor.

The last common commit of FeinCMS 1 and django-content-editor before the fork was made in 2015. The core concepts were basically unchanged since 2009. django-content-editor is a modernization of FeinCMS’s ItemEditor while keeping the good parts about it.