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

31–40 of 43 posts

Re: A new Django content management system

#31

Post by dragop »

tomd wrote: post #20

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…

When you say "translations" I assume you mean just the admin. But does Wagtail support multilingual websites (nothing seems to be in the docs)?

Re: A new Django content management system

#32

Post by thruflo »

I've browsed the site, the documentation, repo and tutorial. I still don't know what the content model or publishing flow is.

I realise that the concept of a generic CMS implies DB backed with bespoke content types. However, it would be nice to know whether there are any 'first-class-citizen' types (user, profile, blog post, etc.), how pages are built or constructed (static html export? dynamic templates?), how edited content is stored and how / whether I might intermingle CMS edited content with UGC content.

This kind of information would be much more interesting to me than learning that the thing is "Beautiful", "Light" and "Agile".

Re: A new Django content management system

#33

Post by tomd »

dragop wrote: post #31
tomd wrote: post #20

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…

When you say "translations" I assume you mean just the admin. But does Wagtail support multilingual websites (nothing seems to be in the docs)?

Yes - we're currently building a multilingual site for an international NGO - but it doesn't currently do anything clever to link different language versions of the same content; in this implementation we're simply allowing editors to reference translated pages with a page chooser UI.

Re: A new Django content management system

#34

Post by tomd »

thruflo wrote: post #32

I've browsed the site, the documentation, repo and tutorial. I still don't know what the content model or publishing flow is. I realise that the concept of a generic CMS implies DB backed with bespoke content types. However, it would be nice to know whether there are any 'first-class-citizen' types (user, profile, blog post, etc.), how pages are built or constructed (static html export? dynamic templates?), how edite…

Thanks for the feedback, @thruflo.

The project site is really focused on potential clients, but you're right that the documentation should be clearer about these basics. The README lists a 'feature' as 'Configure content types through standard Django models', which hopefully makes sense to Django developers; essentially you configure your own content types as Django models and register them as pages, where they inherit tags, slugs, publication dates etc. Users are standard Django users and can be augmented with profiles if you want. The wagtaildemo project [1] includes blog posts as a fully worked-up content type, but you don't have to include these in your project. Pages are constructed on the fly, and Wagtail is Varnish- / Squid-friendly if you have lots of traffic. FWIW we're working on a static HTML export feature which could be used for archiving or publishing to S3 etc. Edited content is stored in the database. You can intermingle CMS and UGC content - students at the Royal College of Art are uploading their own work alongside the content managed by the site's administrators, for example.

Plus it's really beautiful, light and agile :)

[1] https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo

Re: A new Django content management system

#35

Post by thruflo »

tomd wrote: post #34
thruflo wrote: post #32

I've browsed the site, the documentation, repo and tutorial. I still don't know what the content model or publishing flow is. I realise that the concept of a generic CMS implies DB backed with bespoke content types. However, it would be nice to know whether there are any 'first-class-citizen' types (user, profile, blog post, etc.), how pages are built or constructed (static html export? dynamic templates?), how edite…

Thanks for the feedback, @thruflo. The project site is really focused on potential clients, but you're right that the documentation should be clearer about these basics. The README lists a 'feature' as 'Configure content types through standard Django models', which hopefully makes sense to Django developers; essentially you configure your own content types as Django models and register them as pages, where they inher…

Thanks for the info. And for the record, I very much welcome the beauty, lightness and agility :)

Just as a ref, here's a CMS intro that focuses on the content model and workflow: https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous#features-curre...

Re: A new Django content management system

#36

Post by GoodGuy »

tomd wrote: post #33
dragop wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "translations" I assume you mean just the admin. But does Wagtail support multilingual websites (nothing seems to be in the docs)?

Yes - we're currently building a multilingual site for an international NGO - but it doesn't currently do anything clever to link different language versions of the same content; in this implementation we're simply allowing editors to reference translated pages with a page chooser UI.

I see this kind of mental limitation in the brains of many native english speaking software developers.

When developing software for The Internet - a multilingual, international, multicultural communication space - how is it even possible to forget about the requirement to support multiple languages?

In my courses students who do not implement multilingual support right from the beginning into their internet software, they fail.

If you make it an afterwork, it will most likely never be a really good implementation. I recommend to redesign your project and implement multilingual support from step 1 - there is more to this than just linking content pages.

Very disappointing.

Re: A new Django content management system

#37

Post by andybak »

mattwestcott wrote: post #26
dguaraglia wrote: post #19

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…

On the 'framework on top of the framework' point - one thing we've aimed to do with Wagtail is to preserve Django's approach to models, templates and so on, rather than falling into the 'inner platform' trap and building a totally new system that just happens to use Django under the hood. So, for example, page layout is still done with Django's template system, and new page types are just Django models with some addi…

It's a shame you didn't attempt to integrate with the standard admin.

That alone makes you slightly 'an island apart' as I now face the challenge of either:

a) build my own CRUD for parts of the system that aren't directly related to the CMS (products, crm etc etc)

or b) rely on integration with your admin - which I'm guessing isn't as extensible or mature as Django's

Re: A new Django content management system

#38

Post by lefrancaiz »

tomd wrote: post #20

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…

Thank you for making all this work available to everyone.

Re: A new Django content management system

#39

Post by mattwestcott »

timonweb wrote: post #28

Played with Wagtail and the first thing I wanted to find out is how to customize the wysiwyg editor. Is there any API to add / remove buttons, markup, etc? Is it possible or we're stuck with what's offered?

It's not quite possible yet, but that's a frequently requested feature, and we're most of the way there. The wysiwyg component we're using, http://hallojs.org/, supports defining extra buttons via plugins, and Wagtail provides a hook mechanism for passing in custom JS/CSS to the editor - we're just missing a bit of glue to connect the two.

I'm cautious about overloading the rich text editor with too many features - things like tables, say, would be better handled as an explicit part of the page model / template rather than kept in an opaque blob of HTML - but I can appreciate the need for more formatting options.

Re: A new Django content management system

#40

Post by xaritas »

andybak wrote: post #37
mattwestcott wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the 'framework on top of the framework' point - one thing we've aimed to do with Wagtail is to preserve Django's approach to models, templates and so on, rather than falling into the 'inner platform' trap and building a totally new system that just happens to use Django under the hood. So, for example, page layout is still done with Django's template system, and new page types are just Django models with some addi…

It's a shame you didn't attempt to integrate with the standard admin. That alone makes you slightly 'an island apart' as I now face the challenge of either: a) build my own CRUD for parts of the system that aren't directly related to the CMS (products, crm etc etc) or b) rely on integration with your admin - which I'm guessing isn't as extensible or mature as Django's

Wagtail's authoring interface and Django's admin coexist. I believe the demo sets up the Wagtail interface at /admin and puts the standard admin at /django-admin. Presumably you can change those in your urls.py to whatever you like.
Post reply on HN