Using External Content Cards Data

The www-admin repo contains data files and images that are synced to bedrock and available for use on any page. The docs for updating said data is available via that repo, but this page will explain how to use the cards data once it’s in the bedrock database.

Add to a View

The easiest way to make the data available to a page is to add the page_content_cards variable to the template context:

from bedrock.contentcards.models import get_page_content_cards

def view_with_cards(request):
    locale = l10n_utils.get_locale(request)
    ctx = {'page_content_cards': get_page_content_cards('home', locale)}
    return l10n_utils.render(request, 'sweet-words.html', ctx)

The get_page_content_cards returns a dict of card data dicts for the given page (home in this case) and locale. The dict keys are the names of the cards (e.g. card_1). If the page_content_cards context variable is available in the template, then the content_card() macro will discover it automatically.

Note

The get_page_content_cards function is not all that clever as far as l10n is concerned. If you have translated the cards in the www-admin repo that is great, but you should have cards for every locale for which the page is active or the function will return an empty dict. This is especially tricky if you have multiple English locales enabled (en-US, en-CA, en-GB, etc.) and want the same cards to be used for all of them. You’d need to do something like if locale.startswith('en-'): then use en-US in the function call.

Alternately you could just wrap the section of the template using cards to be optional in an {% if page_content_cards %} statement, and that way it will not show the section at all if the dict is empty if there are no cards for that page and locale combination.

Add to the Template

Once you have the data in the template context, using a card is simple:

{% from "macros-protocol.html" import content_card with context %}

{{ content_card('card_1') }}

This will insert the data from the card_1.en-US.md file from the www-admin repo into the template via the card() macro normally used for protocol content cards.

If you don’t have the page_content_cards variable in the template context and you don’t want to create or modify a view, you can fetch the cards via a helper function in the template itself, but you have to pass the result to the macro:

{% from "macros-protocol.html" import content_card with context %}
{% set content_cards = get_page_content_cards('home', LANG) %}

{{ content_card('card_1', content_cards) }}