Static pages

Introduced in InvenioRDM v11

InvenioRDM supports an easy "out-of-the-box" way of creating static pages, basically web pages for which the HTML content is stored in the database, and you can change them using the administration panel.

Define pages

To add the new static pages, create a file named pages.yaml in the app_data folder:

app_data/
└── pages.yaml

Then, inside the file, define the URL, the title, the description and the HTML template of each static page:

# list of pages:
- url: /my-custom-page
  title: My custom page
  description: My custom page
  template: my_custom_page.html

InvenioRDM will look for the content of each static page in the template HTML file, located in a new sub-folder named pages:

app_data/
└── pages
    └──my_custom_page.html

The template file content is what will be imported in the database and rendered to the user when navigating to the page's URL.

Load pages

To load the new static page to your instance, you have 2 options:

1. Run the instance setup command invenio-cli services setup: the command will find the pages defined as above and load them. Warning: this command will delete all your data!

2. In a previously created instance folder, run:

pipenv run invenio rdm pages create

For updating existing templates:

pipenv run invenio rdm pages create --force

This will wipe out all previously created static pages and load them again. I.e. it will delete the templates you have removed from your pages.yaml and update the existing templates with the changes you have made, if any.

Edit pages

Now that your custom page is configured, you can access it from the path you defined in the first step, in our case /my-custom-page. Since we didn't add any content yet, what you will see is an empty page with only a title.

While adding or removing pages can only be done by the developer of an instance, editing a page can be done by an admin user, in the admin-panel at /administration/pages.

Once configured, you can access the pages in the administration panel from the side menu.

Here you will see a list of the pages you configured in the previous steps.

To edit one of your pages, you can click the edit button in the "Actions" column.

This will take you to the edit-form of the page, which will look like this:

As you can see, the title and description we added in the configuration step is already defined in the form. To add some content to the page, you can fill in the "Content" field and click save:

Now we can go to our custom page again and see the content displayed on the page.

Changing the base template

Your custom template will be an extension of the base template defined in invenio-app-rdm. If you want to create your own base template, you can do it by setting the following variables in your invenio.cfg file:

PAGES_DEFAULT_TEMPLATE = "my_site/my_custom_base_template.html"

PAGES_TEMPLATES = [
    ("invenio_pages/dynamic.html", "Default dynamic"),
    ("my_site/my_custom_base_template.html", "Default")
]

This implies that your new template was created in

templates
└── my_site/my_custom_base_template.html

After making this change, you'll have to restart your instance and run

pipenv run invenio rdm pages create --force