Help with understanding generic relations in Django (and usage in Admin)

I'm building a CMS for my company's website (I've looked at the existing Django solutions and want something that's much slimmer/simpler, and that handles our situation specifically.. Plus, I'd like to learn this stuff better). I'm having trouble wrapping my head around generic relations.

I have a Page model, a SoftwareModule model, and some other models that define content on our website, each with their get_absolute_url() defined. I'd like for my users to be able to assign any Page instance a list of objects, of any type, including other page instances. This list will become that Page instance's sub-menu.

I've tried the following:

class Page(models.Model):
    body = models.TextField()
    links = generic.GenericRelation("LinkedItem")

    @models.permalink
    def get_absolute_url(self):
        # returns the right URL

class LinkedItem(models.Model):
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')

    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

class SoftwareModule(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    description = models.TextField()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

    @models.permalink
    def get_absolute_url(self):
        # returns the right URL

This gets me a generic relation with an API to do page_instance.links.all(). We're on our way. What I'm not sure how to pull off, is on the page instance's change form, how to create the relationship between that page, and any other extant object in the database. My desired end result: to render the following in a template:

<ul>
{% for link in page.links.all %}
    <li><a href='{{ link.content_object.get_absolute_url() }}'>{{ link.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor%}
</ul>

Obviously, there's something I'm unaware of or mis-understanding, but I feel like I'm, treading into that area where I don't know what I don't know. What am I missing?

Solution

How are the LinkedItem associated with a Page? A GenericRelation is used for a reverse relationship, but as it stands now there isn't any relationship so it has nothing to match to. I think this is what you're looking for in your model design:

class Page(models.Model):
    body = models.TextField()
    # Moved generic relation to below

class LinkedItem(models.Model):
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')

    # LinkedItems now relate to a Page model, and we're establishing the relationship
    # by specifying 'links' to keep the syntax you're looking for
    page = models.ForeignKey(Page, related_name='links')

    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

On a side note, this model setup allows one LinkedItem to relate to a Page. If you wanted to re-use linkeditems, you could make it a M2M:

class Page(models.Model):
    body = models.TextField()
    links = models.ManyToManyField(LinkedItem)

class LinkedItem(models.Model):
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')

    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

In both of these instances, page.links.all() will be all of the linked items.

Also, parenthesis aren't used in the template syntax.