The any_urlfield module provides an improved URL selector that supports both URLs to internal models and external URLs.

This addresses is a common challenge in CMS interfaces; where providing a URLField makes it hard to enter internal URLs, while providing a ModelChoiceField makes it too inflexible. This package provides the both of both worlds.

For more details, see the documentation at Read The Docs.

First install the module, preferably in a virtual environment. It can be installed from PyPI:

pip install django-any-urlfield

Or the current folder can be installed:

pip install .

Add the module to the installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS += (
    'any_urlfield',
)

In a Django model, the field can be included:

from django.db import models
from any_urlfield.models import AnyUrlField

class MyModel(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField("Title", max_length=200)
    url = AnyUrlField("URL")

By default, the AnyUrlField only supports linking to external pages. To add support for your own models (e.g. an Article model), include the following code in models.py:

from any_urlfield.models import AnyUrlField
AnyUrlField.register_model(Article)

Now, the AnyUrlField offers users a dropdown field to directly select an article. By default, it uses a django.forms.models.ModelChoiceField field with a django.forms.widgets.Select widget to render the field. This can be customized using the form_field and widget parameters:

from any_urlfield.models import AnyUrlField
from any_urlfield.forms import SimpleRawIdWidget

AnyUrlField.register_model(Article, widget=SimpleRawIdWidget(Article))

Now, the Article model will be displayed as raw input field with a browse button.

This module is designed to be generic. In case there is anything you didn't like about it, or think it's not flexible enough, please let us know. We'd love to improve it!

If you have any other valuable contribution, suggestion or idea, please let us know as well because we will look into it. Pull requests are welcome too. :-)