Medium · published August 20, 2026
django CMS is an easy-to-use and developer-friendly enterprise content management system powered by Django. From 5.0.8 until 5.0.9, ContentRenderer.render_placeholder in cms/plugin_rendering.py can pass stored, attacker-controlled values to ContentRenderer.render_exception when plugin rendering fails in edit mode. Values from get_short_description(), the exception message, the placeholder, or placeholder.source are interpolated into a cms-rendering-exception heading and later returned through mark_safe. Because the heading is not escaped, stored HTML executes in an editor’s browser, and settings.DEBUG does not prevent the custom heading from rendering. The fix uses format_html to escape the message before safe placeholder output is returned. This issue is fixed in versions 5.0.9.