Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new Django content management system

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 43 posts

Re: A new Django content management system

#11

Post by thmorton »

marcosscriven wrote: post #9

I have a couple of sites for friends, which I setup ages ago, for which I used Drupal - only because a) My design skills weren't that great, and I could use a package called Artisteer to create the theme b) It was a CMS - so my mates could just add content themselves Now - turns out that the Drupal interface is still a bit confusing for people that don't care for tech. Plus, I'm having to host it on my own server. Ca…

Back in the day, CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/) was pretty excellent, but I haven't used it in a few years. PHP-based (so you can host it pretty much anywhere), and fairly easy to use.

Re: A new Django content management system

#12

Post by xaritas »

phaer wrote: post #8
xaritas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like django-cms or various PHP-based CMS (Conrete5 comes to mind) where a template defines "slots" into which an administrator can drop different type of content widgets. In spirit, it's much more like Mezzanine, where each Page has a particular type and an associated template. Your page is just a Django model, so if you want three areas for text, an image, and a caption, you'll have a model which has three…

If you are part of the Wagtail team: Can you elaborate a bit on the differences between Mezzanine and Wagtail? On the website it says: > But having built content-managed websites for 14 years we have strong opinions about the editor experience and how a CMS should work and be structured, and we need to manage a more rapid pace of development than we can achieve by contributing to existing projects. .. and your editor…

I'm not on the team, but I've used both. I would be interested in seeing both maintainer's answer to this, too.

At a high level, I can see how there might have been a bit of friction in trying to implement Wagtail on top of Mezzanine. Mezzanine's features, admin interface, and content model are fairly tightly integrated (I hope I'm not misrepresenting Mezzanine here, I think that this is an affirmative goal of the project). It provides a lot for the developer and the site admin out of the box—usable templates, basic page types, a blog, an image library. On the other hand, Wagtail core offers surprisingly little—the wagtaildemo project is a nice starting point for some basic content types, but it's just another user of the Wagtail API.

For me, the killer features of Wagtail are: deep integration with ElasticSearch, a moderation based workflow, content revision tracking, document library. It's feature list is like a love letter to institutional clients. However, that's a lot of code that is not integral to Mezzanine, and I don't think it fits with the maintainer's philosophy of "it's integrated, but not a kitchen sink." [Note: I made up this quote.]

To both maintainers, nice work, and thanks.

Re: A new Django content management system

#13

Post by yen223 »

phaer wrote: post #7
izietto wrote: post #5

Why there is not the demo; I don't evaluate web products which do not provide a demo in their site

There is a demo, you can run it locally using vagrant and it's linked in the README: https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/ . If you are asking for a hosted demo, then I don't know if there is one but you could always set up your own one on services like OpenShift.

The Show HN link from the original creators has a link to a site built out of wagtail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164

Re: A new Django content management system

#17

Post by ryannevius »

JelteF wrote: post #15
ryannevius wrote: post #14

Can it be used with Django 1.7? What versions of Django are required? I didn't see it listed anywhere...Maybe I'm blind.

The setup.py makes clear that Django 1.7 is not supported. 1.6.2 or higher should be used.

Of course it does. I'm trying to make the point that one shouldn't even have to dig that minuscule amount to find out. It's as simple as adding a line to their landing page: Wagtail supports Python 2.7 and Django 1.6.2.

Re: A new Django content management system

#18

Post by themodelplumber »

egeozcan wrote: post #10
marcosscriven wrote: post #9

I have a couple of sites for friends, which I setup ages ago, for which I used Drupal - only because a) My design skills weren't that great, and I could use a package called Artisteer to create the theme b) It was a CMS - so my mates could just add content themselves Now - turns out that the Drupal interface is still a bit confusing for people that don't care for tech. Plus, I'm having to host it on my own server. Ca…

I'd recommend Processwire[1]. It's really easy to use any HTML template with it and I personally find it much easier to work with than Drupal. The catch is, by using this or Drupal, you are storing your models on the database and you can't version control a model in a database without getting really creative. [1]: http://processwire.com/

ProcessWire is really great. Some people complain that it doesn't have quite the off-the-shelf setup of pre-made modules for e.g. powerful e-commerce or super easy theming, but I think regardless it's an example of the way a CMS/CMF should be written in the 2010s. In fact I approached a developer of one of the early CMSes that is still hanging around, and he was quite interested in migrating to PW as a content management framework backend rather than using an application framework. The CMS part of ProcessWire is built upon the ProcessWire content management API and it's easy to build your own custom back end if you don't like it.

With a content management framework (such as PW), so much has already been done for you that you start to wonder why you will ever need an application framework. Of course, application frameworks are very useful but CMFs are not to be missed out on. I just finished writing a project management system using ProcessWire and it's been a lot of fun. Like building-with-Legos fun. I hope to see clones or variants appear in other languages as I'd happily give them a try as I expand my CS education.

Re: A new Django content management system

#19

Post by dguaraglia »

Paraphrasing Bruce McKinney on Visual Basic (who was probably paraphrasing someone else): "Django-based CMS systems make the easy easier and the hard impossible".

I worked with Django for about 4 years of my life, maybe more if we consider some proof-of-concept projects. Every single 'framework on top of the framework' (with the exception of Django REST Framework) I've tried has been 'almost perfect', but that little delta between what you have and perfection is impossible to bridge. Just the dependency hell introduced by some of the projects is reason enough to give up.

If all you want is a simple CMS with support for some markup and adding images/videos, you can throw that together using Django, the Markdown module and one of the myriad upload plugins in a couple of days. You want to provide RSS? Use the built-in feed system. You'll spend more time reading the documentation and tweaking the settings file than putting the whole thing together yourself.

Re: A new Django content management system

#20

Post by tomd »

I'm from Torchbox, the creators and maintainers of this project. It's nice to see Wagtail back on HN. For those who saw my original Show HN post a couple of months ago, here's as overview of progress since then:

- Tests: stung by some of the (very reasonable) criticisms after launch, we worked hard to increase our test coverage - https://coveralls.io/r/torchbox/wagtail

- Docs: still a way to go, but our documentation is much better, and now includes an editor's manual: http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/editor_manual/

- Translations: we were delighted by the immediate response of translators, whose work we're managing through the excellent Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/wagtail/

- Installation: we reduced dependencies (including Sass instead of LESS, and plain JS instead of Coffeescript, so we could drop npm); we made Redis and Elasticsearch optional; we wrote one-liners for Debian and Ubuntu; we improved the installation docs; third parties contributed Docker images.

- UI: we've continued to refine the interface, with feedback from our own clients as well as helpful strangers. In 0.3 we added the 'edit bird', a toolbar allowing logged-in users to add and edit pages from the site's front-end.

- Modularisation: Wagtail now supports alternative backends for image processing (currently PIL and Wand), searching (currently Elasticsearch and SQL) and content embedding (currently OEmbed and Embedly).

- Compatibility: we're working on Python 3 and Django 1.7 support. We've recently added tox to help us test multiple versions for thoroughly.

We're also adding features, but slowly and carefully. A form-builder and scheduled publishing should be released imminently.

We're very grateful for everyone's interest and contributions, even if it's just a harsh word on HN!

Post reply on HN