smartsnippets is a django-cms plugin similar to the builtin snippet plugin but instead of allowing only plain HTML you can use any valid Django template syntax inside and also you can configure certain variables in template snippet to be filled once the smartsnippet is added to a placeholder on a page. This is much more flexible than the standard snippet if you want to parametrize and reuse your static snippets.

An important feature of smartsnippets is manual specification of variables and variable types when adding an html snippet.

Smart snippet ships a set of basic variable Field types with the app:

TextField, TextAreaField, DropDownField.

This module also provides a registration manager for field types

so that third party apps can hook in with custom editing fields and user admin behavior.

Create a simple smartsnippet using the Twitter profile example:

1. Add the template code(of the path to the template file):
<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
<script>
new TWTR.Widget({
  version: 2,
  type: 'profile',
  rpp: 4,
  interval: 30000,
  width: 250,
  height: 300,
  theme: {
    shell: {
      background: '#333333',
      color: '#ffffff'
    },
    tweets: {
      background: '{{ background }}',
      color: '#ffffff',
      links: '#4aed05'
    }
  },
  features: {
    scrollbar: false,
    loop: false,
    live: false,
    behavior: 'all'
  }
}).render().setUser('{{ twitter_username }}').start();
</script>

Note the ``{{ background }}`` and ``{{ twitter_username }}`` variable used as standard Django variables.

2. Configure background and twitter_username variables:
    a. Variable name: twitter_username
       Variable widget: TextField(because the twitter username is a simple and relatively short text)
    b. Variable name: background
       Variable widget: DropDownField
       Variable choices: #000000, #eeeeee, #cecece
3. When adding the smartsnippet in a page, the form will provide:
    a. an input text field where you can set a value of twitter_username
    b. a select html tag having as options the list of choices (#000000, #eeeeee, #cecece)
       added when the background variable was configured.

Terms:

SS = Smart Snippet Chosen Snippets List = Can be seen by accessing http://localhost:8000/admin/sites/site/40/, where 40 is the id of a particular site, can be any valid id It represents the list with selected SS for the current site (the right one). SS List = Can be seen by following: http://localhost:8000/admin/smartsnippets/smartsnippet/ SS Plugin drop down = This is the drop down from SS plugin which allows SSs to be selected for the current page.

There are three configuration variables available:

• SMARTSNIPPETS_INCLUDE_ORPHAN a boolean flag that defaults to True. If this option is enabled, selecting a site in the smartsnippet creation form is optional. If a smartsnippet doesn't belong to any site it will behave as global and will be available in all sites. If set to False the user will be forced to link the smartsnipptes that he creates to at least one site.

  A SS can become orphan if all its sites have been deleted. This setting controls if orphan SSs can be displayed in SS List or to be available for SS Plugin drop down.

• SMARTSNIPPETS_RESTRICT_USER a boolean flag that defaults to False. This flag, if set, will limit the smartsnippets that a user can access based on his relation to sites trough the global pages permission system. This can be useful in a shared environment. By default a user can access all the smartsnippets in the system.

  If this setting is True the current user will only have access to smart snippets which are assigned to sites on which he as global page permissions. Otherwise the user will have acess to all smart snippets.

  For example, if the current user has global page permissions for Site1, Site2 and Site3, he will be allowed to edit smart snippets which belong to these three sites.

• SMARTSNIPPETS_CACHING_TIME is the number of seconds that rendered smart snippets will be cached. Defaults to 300. This can be used to greatly improve performance by removing the need for querying the database for variable values and skiping the template rendering logic. To disable the caching set this to 0. No caching is being done if logged in as a staff user.