Pages 404 when created via the django-cms API - django-cms

Question

I'm building a system which creates a site object for clients added to the system and off the back of that creates some basic pages for the site.
Pages are created with published=True however after browsing to them via pages admin or directly to URLs the result is a 404.
To fix the 404 I've noticed simply saving the page's settings then makes the pages load. I therefore suspect there's further actions which are triggered by the CMS admin, whether that be through the form used or signals.
The Code
The creation of pages comes from a post_save signal;
#receiver(post_save, sender=Client)
def create_site_on_client_creation(instance, **kwargs):
"""
When a Client is created, create a Site object with the client slug as a
sub-domain to the main sites base domain. Also update the site object
if the client slug changes.
"""
site = instance.site or Site()
if not instance.site_id:
instance.site = site
instance.save(update_fields=['site'])
create_initial_pages(
site, extra_pages=[
'Privacy Policy',
'Terms of Use'
]
)
The function then creating the content is;
def create_initial_pages(site, **kwargs):
""" Create the initial pages required for a site """
# Create a CMS "home" page on the initial site creation
created_root = False
root_page = Page.objects.on_site(site).drafts().filter(
title_set__language=settings.LANGUAGE_CODE,
title_set__title=HOME_TITLE,
is_home=True
).first()
if not root_page:
created_root = True
root_page = create_page(
title=HOME_TITLE,
template=TEMPLATE_INHERITANCE_MAGIC,
language=settings.LANGUAGE_CODE,
site=site,
published=True
)
if 'extra_pages' in kwargs:
for page_title in kwargs['extra_pages']:
# Check if we can find
existing = Page.objects.on_site(site).drafts().filter(
title_set__language=settings.LANGUAGE_CODE,
title_set__title=page_title,
).exists()
if not existing:
create_page(
title=page_title,
template=TEMPLATE_INHERITANCE_MAGIC,
language=settings.LANGUAGE_CODE,
site=site,
parent=root_page,
published=True
)
if created_root:
root_page.is_home = True
root_page.save()

Answer 1

I think what's happening here is that you are making changes to the root page after it is published which is therefore making changes to the draft:
if created_root:
root_page.is_home = True
root_page.save()
# You may need to publish here
root_page.publish(settings.LANGUAGE_CODE)
The API always fires the publish action on creation if the published kwarg is added: https://github.com/divio/django-cms/blob/develop/cms/api.py#L203
The tests are a good place to see how the api is used by code, finding a test that creates a page tree should help you to see if you have missed a specific setting that causes your page to not be seen: https://github.com/divio/django-cms/blob/develop/cms/tests/test_multilingual.py#L85
Also be sure that your new site has a language configuration in the settings file, it's possible that the admin is confused by the page and language combination and when you "save the page settings" you are actually creating an entry in your current language: http://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/reference/configuration.html#internationalisation-and-localisation-i18n-and-l10n
I would advise rolling / commenting your code back to just the one root page and get that working as you expect, then when that is working you can expand upon it with more pages.

Answer 2

Try just calling the publish method (with a language) on the page after the call to create_page. You'll need to get the page from the create_page method. e.g...
my_page = create_page(
title=page_title,
template=TEMPLATE_INHERITANCE_MAGIC,
language=settings.LANGUAGE_CODE,
site=site,
parent=root_page,
published=True
)
my_page.publish("en")