Wagtail • Hacker News Board

Re: Wagtail

#21

Post by MatthewWilkes » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 12:23 PM UTC

tomd wrote: post #18

Andrenid wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very major reason on why Wordpress is so widely used, is how easy it is to install on just about anything above a toaster. Meanwhile, this is how you install Wagtail: http://spapas.github.io/2014/02/13/wagtail-tutorial/

That was a very helpful introduction in Wagtail's early days, but setup and installation has become much simpler since then. For Python developers it's as simple as pip install wagtail wagtail start mysite Or you can deploy the demo to Heroku in one click: https://heroku.com/deploy?template=https://github.com/torchb...

That works really nicely, I like the use of vagrant but it does give a hint that there might be rather complex requirements.

On a different note, I saw your Bristol Media post about Django freelancers the other week and have been meaning to get in touch (my current contract ends in a month and a half). Does much of this dev work happen in the Bristol office or is it primarily London-lead?

Re: Wagtail

#22

Post by gizzlon » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 12:23 PM UTC

Wagtail looks nice, although I haven't used it much.

(shameless plug:) I made a Docker image for the Wagtail Demo to make it easier to test out:

https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/oyvindsk/wagtail-demo/ https://github.com/oyvindsk/docker-playground/tree/master/do...

    docker run -p 8000:8000 -d oyvindsk/wagtail-demo

Haven't tried it in a while, but hopefully it still works :)

Re: Wagtail

#23

Post by tomd » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 12:29 PM UTC

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #21

tomd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a very helpful introduction in Wagtail's early days, but setup and installation has become much simpler since then. For Python developers it's as simple as pip install wagtail wagtail start mysite Or you can deploy the demo to Heroku in one click: https://heroku.com/deploy?template=https://github.com/torchb...

That works really nicely, I like the use of vagrant but it does give a hint that there might be rather complex requirements. On a different note, I saw your Bristol Media post about Django freelancers the other week and have been meaning to get in touch (my current contract ends in a month and a half). Does much of this dev work happen in the Bristol office or is it primarily London-lead?

We're always looking for good Django freelancers, wherever they're based, but particularly in Oxford and Bristol. Email my first name at torchbox.com.

Re: Wagtail

#24

Post by magnetised » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 12:40 PM UTC

jbrooksuk wrote: post #6

We've been looking at several CMS's to use for our upcoming website rewrites. Since our content is quite broad and unique in the way that it links together, we've found that existing solutions doesn't really fit into the usual CMS solutions. Therefore we've been looking at using something which is focused on providing an API to the content. Examples of these: - https://prismic.io/ - https://www.contentful.com/ - http…

Bit of a plug but (as the developer of) Spontaneous[0] I can highly recommend it for this kind of use case.

It aims to be decoupled, that is the system you edit with is not (necessarily) tied into the system you serve your site to the public with. It does this through a publishing mechanism. This defaults to rendering HTML pages (both static & dynamic ones) but can be extended to output anything you want, either replacing the standard HTML output or in addition to it (I personally have integrated with a pyramid based python app using a db based output, that is effectively "render my content into a db table" but you can do less esoteric things like publish JSON or XML docs if that's your need.

It works using content type 'blocks' composed of sets of many fields (of varying types). I like to think of it as a "strongly typed" CMS.

[0]: https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous

Re: Wagtail

#25

Post by joshbarr » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

jbrooksuk wrote: post #6

We've been looking at several CMS's to use for our upcoming website rewrites. Since our content is quite broad and unique in the way that it links together, we've found that existing solutions doesn't really fit into the usual CMS solutions. Therefore we've been looking at using something which is focused on providing an API to the content. Examples of these: - https://prismic.io/ - https://www.contentful.com/ - http…

My agency spent a while planning a Node.js API CMS build of our own, as well as evaluating Prismic and Contentful. We needed something we could confidently sell to clients, that was open source, user friendly and easy to extend. It also had to run on our clients' own stacks and meet their audit criteria. Wagtail suits those requirements well.

It's worth noting that the Wagtail API module is for GETting content at this point – though I hear a more fully featured read/write API is in the works. Wagtail "is just Django" so it's easy enough to plug in the REST framework and build endpoints on that.

I implemented Prismic for a startup recently, and the API is also read-only. It's got some very powerful semantic content markup and versioning stuff, but I found it quite a chore to get more than single nodes out of it. In the end, our content editors didn't like the git-centric "content releases" metaphor, so they moved off to something else.

Contentful has the read/write API thing down, good support, very actively developed. Unfortunately it doesn't support tree-based content, preferring flat collections with relations, though trees are something many users are asking for. As we're migrating lots of sites (off a PHP CMS) that have well-tested trees, we couldn't quite go that far just yet.

tl;dr? No solution is perfect, but Wagtail is making us happy devs, and the community is very friendly. Good luck with your CMS hunt!

Re: Wagtail

#26

Post by Ciantic » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 4:43 PM UTC

Django should have some simple plugin install system built-in, auto update capability like in WordPress. It's not friendly to test different modules as one must always dig the settings.py and hunt the docs of relevant modules.