Make Flatpage swappable

[Vlastimil Zíma]

It's kind of a long shot, but I give it a try.

Let's make Flatpage swappable. I've opened a discussion about the feature at ​https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-developers/WFdCEpB-fMM/6rRae4QLBgAJ. Despite the little support at developers, I suspect the swap would be used once available.

There is a number of attempts to extend the flatpages

• #18331
• #23743
• #26762
• ​https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-users/hl4dO1Lxi7Y/aE82ZjNxB-cJ
• ​https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-users/XluinfrJaK8/5G2ioMt5HVwJ

Since it is not possible to inherit custom Flatpage from an abstract Flatpage model, there are two options. Make an extra table which generates join on every use, which is ineffective, or copy the whole Flatpage application, which is terrible to maintain. There is number of projects which extends the Flatpage by copying the whole model

• ​https://github.com/danawoodman/django-flatpages-plus
• ​https://github.com/PragmaticMates/django-flatpages-i18n
• ​https://github.com/toastdriven/django-superflatpages
• ​https://github.com/FUUK/fuuk/tree/master/fuuk/fuflatpages

I assume the lack of support at developers mailing list is caused by developers who needed to extend Flatpage already did it one way or another, it most cases by copying the flatpages app as is.

The swappable is already implemented, so let's use it.

[Vlastimil Zíma]

Great. So what now? Should I try to make a patch if I find a time to do so?

[Aymeric Augustin]

Yes, submitting a pull request is the next step.

The most important part is likely documentation.

[Tim Graham]

Before introducing another swappable model, I'd like to see the documentation about some of the known difficulties with swappable models addressed: #24370 and #25313.