Django CMS 3.2 released

Sorry, I feel qualified to disagree here since I used to use Drupal (v6 and v7) for all my company's projects. That is, until the day I discovered django CMS. Then, I literally never looked back. Building out projects is probably 3-4X faster using django CMS and it is so much easier to scale the resulting site using the power of Django.

There is only one thing I miss from Drupal, and that is the ability to create new "content types" on-the-fly. But here lies it weakness too. The resulting DB structure that allows this is relatively complicated which means that any custom development you do outside of the normal Drupal stuff is also more complicated than it has to be. This also has a direct performance impact.

With Django (and by extension, django CMS), the structure of the database is as clean or complicated as you require, and, there's nifty tools for migrating the schema and/or data as you evolve your project. Its beautiful, really.

I would say if you want something that is pre-designed-ish, use Zinnia. If you have a specific design that you need to implement and would prefer to start with a less complicated set of templates, go with Aldryn NewsBlog.

I have used Drupal 6 and 7 to create probably 20 projects in the past. Once I discovered django CMS, I never looked back. In one case, I had a customer come to me for an extension to this Drupal site I had built for them previously. It was an option that I had also quoted a price for back when I built the site, but they didn't choose that option at the time.

When they came to me for this option later, I was already in love with Python/Django/django CMS and really did not want to work in PHP/Drupal again. So, I offered to build the option, but also to re-build the entire project in django CMS and migrate it for the same price as just the option. To be fair, I probably spent about 10% more time than I was budgeted for just the option itself, but the end result was an entirely new site in django CMS with the option with all their existing data migrated over.

The client was thrilled with the result because these these resulting differences:

• The server cost to host the new site was only about 55% of that of the old site;

• Even with the reduction in server costs, the site could deliver pages 800X faster, thanks mostly to the amazing caching capabilities and Memcache integration of Django;

• Frontend performance went up by almost 2X (granted, I did clean some things up along the way);

• The administration was much easier to understand for the client. In part this was due to the brilliant Django Admin, but also due to the multiple custom integrations I quickly built to make things easier for them;

• And of course, because they now had this extra option on the site =)

Disclosure: I do work for Divio and I am one of the core-devs of django CMS, but the above anecdote all happened well before this.