

Mezzanine 1.2 and Cartridge 0.6 (Django CMS and Ecommerce platforms) released - stephen_mcd
https://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/thread/89c2e3a22d9c177c

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mkotsalainen
I work for large web consultancy firm in Sweden. We've been offering Wordpress
and Drupal as a 'lightweight' alternatives to commercial CMSes for these past
three years. Even though WP and Drupal are great open source products they've
been causing us pain and we've been looking for alternatives. First, we would
prefer not to work in Php. It's a broken language and it won't be fixed
anytime soon. Ruby and Python are simply better choices. WP has a _top notch_
admin interface but its data model is not suited to anything other than a
simple blog. Custom post types aren't that fun when you want to do custom
queries against the wp_postmeta table. Drupals major problem is its
configuration management. You build a Drupal site by clicking around in an
admin interface and all those settings have to be transfered to prod somehow.
In theory, the Drupal module Features should solve that problem (it serializes
the config state to code) but even though we use it (we have to - no large
Drupal project can do without it), it gives us pain every day. Also, Drupal
feels bloated and old, but that is my subjective opinion.

I've been evaluating Ruby / Python CMS alternatives for the past few years,
and Mezzanine is the first non-php CMS that I've encountered that has the
polish that is needed if you want to appeal to all those Php (or corporate)
devs and their pointy-haired bosses. Its documentation and code is top notch.
It has a small friendly community where Stephen McDonald (Mezz founder) is
very active. We're doing a small (< 3 months project) with Mezzanine to kick
the tires and if it works out we'll be able to recommend it to our clients.
I've been working with Mezzanine for about a month now, I feel very productive
with it. Its a great feeling to look at the framework source code and very
quickly understand what it is doing because it is so simple. South is a
beautiful technology, it allows us to evolve our custom page types fast in a
controlled manner.

Thank you Mezzanine contributors!

~~~
lsh
Just thought I would mention that "South" (<http://south.aeracode.org/>) is a
database schema migration plugin for Django. It generates files containing the
operations required to 'migrate' (alter and update) your schema and it's data
from one version to another. These files sit nicely in the repository and can
be run all at once or one at a time to bring a database up to snuff.

I've found it's really excellent once my db schema has settled into something
relatively stable when future changes become more disruptive.

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gour
At the moment I've to use PHP CMS-es nto being able to find something which is
easy enough for Python noob to start with.

When I was looking last time in Django world, there was FeinCMS (not quite
end-user app) and Django-CMS having some deps (hell) problems and Mezzanine
was quite young at that time.

Tried my luck with web2py, but there one is, seemingly, supposed to write
everything from the scratch which is too time-consuming for me 'cause there
are no actively developed CMS-es/blog engines with active community of users.

Recently, we took another look at CMS/blog/ecommerce apps in Django
world...Mezzanine is the clear winner - actively developed, nice community
build around it which helps/improve applications, great documentation, very
responsive main developer, decent CMS/blog/ecommerce nicely
integrated....shorty, everything what we could hope to find in order to move
from PHP for _all_ our web needs, but not requiring huge amount of time to
startup.

Congrats for beautiful application given for free to end-users &
developers...and I hope being able to contribute back somehow pretty soon. ;)

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stephen_mcd
For anyone interested, there's a live demo of both these systems available:

Backend: <http://mezzanine.jupo.org/admin/> (user/pass: demo/demo)

Frontend: (with live-editing) <http://mezzanine.jupo.org/blog/>

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knes
Nice project! I'm currently looking to build a quick website/cms based on
Wordpress + woocommerce. I'll look into Mezzanine / cartridge too.

The one thing that looks "hard" for me ( I'am a noob ) after skimming the
documentation is the payment gateway integration.

~~~
joshcartme
What part of it looks hard?

Depending on your programming knowledge integrating a payment gateway
shouldn't be too hard. Take a look at some of the ones that have already been
done:
[https://bitbucket.org/stephenmcd/cartridge/src/5be5cd01496b/...](https://bitbucket.org/stephenmcd/cartridge/src/5be5cd01496b/cartridge/shop/payment/)

If you look at the Authorize.net one for example, most of the lines of code
are setting up the POST data. The actual posting is only about 6 lines or so.

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gitarr
This is exactly what I need for an upcoming project of mine.

So clean, with amazing features and best of all in Python, this will be fun.

