
Django CMS 3.2 released - intellectronica
http://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2015/11/24/django-cms-32/
======
JonAtkinson
As another poster points out, there aren't a lot of CMS-related posts on HN,
but I'd like to share a little of our experience with Django CMS.

I've been using Django CMS since early in the 2.x releases (the earliest
Django CMS site I still have the code for was using 2.1.0.beta2), and since
then we have developed approximately 80 Django CMS sites; with traffic ranging
from a few hundred hits a month, to our largest which serves a few hundred
thousand hits per day across three languages.

In all this time, I still haven't found a compelling reason to switch to
anything else. Django CMS's most powerful feature is that it's just plain old
Django. This means that it's rare we can't use the CMS as a base framework for
a site, and then plug custom applications into the site tree as necessary.
Certainly few of our clients have needs which are exotic enough where this
pattern breaks down. Yes, this requires a certain amount of learning curve,
but it's not insurmountable at all, and I think it's conceptually simpler than
most other CMSes out there (I've been an agency-side web developer for 15
years, and I still can't figure out how some people mangle the Wordpress page
loop).

I was concerned early in the 3.x cycle when front-end editing was introduced
(and I believe the introduction was mishandled by the development team), but
recent releases have polished this to a level where I can ship it to clients
with confidence. This week we launched a new site using 3.2, and content
wizards, in particular, are a powerful addition (will these be made multi-step
in the future? It would be nice from a UI point of view).

The CMS in general is in good hands, though I do worry that without strong
community leadership, it might move too far towards being 'the platform which
powers Aldryn', rather than a strong stand-alone CMS. Maybe that's too
negative, but I do see it as a risk.

5 years ago I made a bet on Django CMS, and it turned out good, so I'm happy.
Maybe it'll serve the next 5 years.

~~~
mkane848
I'm currently tasked with creating a new version of my company's Intranet
system and have been looking into the different CMS options out there and
talking over choices like SharePoint and OpenAtrium with my co-worker.

Would you recommend DjangoCMS for an Intranet? I'm planning to implement
collaborative content tools and a company wiki (probably going with MediaWiki)
on top of keeping features we've already got, and the only external
applications we deal with are ADP and BST.

I'm a LOT more familiar with Python than I am PHP, so finding a framework I
can hit the ground running with would be huge. Thanks!

~~~
cbertschy
We are currently developing a intranet solution for django CMS at Divio. I
cannot give you a ETA yet, but should we inform you once it's available?

~~~
rufugee
Would love to learn more about this...

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currysausage
Off-topic, but since CMS-related submissions come up rather scarcely nowadays:
What are some promising, modern Web Content Management Systems for medium-
sized sites that I should look at, especially if I like the clean, modular
design of ProcessWire very much, but not its implementation (too slow even
with caching enabled)?

I don't care about the programming language (PHP is fine, so is anything
else). What I do care about is flexibility in terms of custom page types (e.g.
define "Author", "Title", "Description", "ISBN", and "Cover Image" fields for
page type "Book"; loop through such child items on the parent page).

Is Django CMS something that might make me happy? Are there any new projects
on the horizon that look promising?

~~~
EnderMB
On PHP I quite like Concrete5. It's reasonably clean, and while I've only used
it on small sites there are a bunch of people using it as their main CMS for
decent sized sites.

The CMS I use the most is Umbraco. It's an open-source ASP.NET CMS that I've
used on a varied range of sites, from small to very large. It has its flaws,
like most of these types of tools, but I recommend downloading it, and giving
it a quick test.

~~~
blueatlas
I'll second the Concrete5 recommendation. It's MVC under the covers, a common
sense architecture, highly customizable, an exceptional UI for content
editors, and a good community. For content editors, we do a one hour boot camp
and that is sufficient to bring anyone non-technical up to speed.

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mladenkovacevic
What is the best blog app to use with Django-CMS? I've been using Zinnia with
an older release, but I see that your demo uses the new Aldryn Newsblog app.

I'm looking to do a small redesign along with re-deploying a website with 3.2
but I don't feel like going back and re-theming Zinnia to fit with my new
design. Is Aldryn's app a simpler solution?

~~~
DanieleProcida
Zinnia's great, [https://developer.ubuntu.com/](https://developer.ubuntu.com/)
uses it for example.

Aldryn News & Blog was created from scratch, fairly recently; if you're using
the Aldryn Bootstrap code, it'll all itegrate very quickly and easily.

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m15hbah
Love the content wizard mechanism.

Makes it super easy for the my clients to add blog posts.

It's fairly easy to implement the logic too.

~~~
mkoistinen
<3

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jmr0
Excellent work! I'm really liking the structure board changes, as I had run
into some issues with that in the past.

I've used Django CMS for client work and have been very happy - it's all the
power of Django combined with a nice user interface for clients to manage
their content. It's also very easy to integrate with existing Django
sites/plugins.

Anyone working with medium-sized websites and trying to stay away from the PHP
world should look into it for their next project.

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softinio
I have been using mezzannine. Worth moving to this? What are its advantages
over mezzannine?

Thanks.

~~~
DanieleProcida
I'm one of the django CMS developers, but I am not going to start announcing
that django CMS is better than this or that other CMS (especially since I
haven't even used Mezzanine myself).

They do take different approaches, and one approach might suit you better than
the other. Mezzanine is a very fine CMS, but is based on different principles
and solves different problems.

If you want a Wordpress-style package that works in that kind of out-of-the-
box way, perhaps Mezzanine is better for you. If you want a system that is
more suited to very large sites and integration with third-party applications,
probably you're better off with django CMS. (And I hope I have not
mischaracterised Mezzanine by saying that.)

If you're at all interested in django CMS, try it. If you're a Django user
already, you'll find it very easy to install and launch an instance:
[http://docs.django-cms.org/en/user-
tutorial/introduction/ins...](http://docs.django-cms.org/en/user-
tutorial/introduction/install.html).

And if you want to get a quick taste of how it works for the user:
[http://demo.django-cms.org](http://demo.django-cms.org).

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brownsugar100
Touch support is very promising looking forward to use it on my ipad

~~~
cbertschy
That would be great, we are trying to gather as much feedback as possible from
users that are trying it out on touch devices, thanks!

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mrmondo
I'd love to hear from anyone who's migrated or moved from Drupal to Django
CMS. We have around 100 Drupal CMS' that we've been working with for years and
we can't wait to get rid of them to something more modern, even Drupal 8 is a
massive, to late - to little disappointment. Any stories?

~~~
mkoistinen
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.

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marcosdumay
When I tried it, I could make Django CMS run, because it needed a long list of
requirements, with their own requirements, and I couldn't get a set of
packages that worked together.

I'm glad that this issue seems to be solved now. Current requirements are very
reasonable. Will try it again.

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xenophonf
Whelp, time to update my small constellation of Django-related FreeBSD ports!
Good work, guys!

------
afandian
Does anyone have any experience comparing this to Wagtail.io, a new CMS-that-
uses-Django?

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etchalon
Is this still a Terrible Tree of Widgets design?

~~~
acdha
Beyond the documentation, they have a demo if you want to find out:

[https://control.aldryn.com/demo/get-
new/](https://control.aldryn.com/demo/get-new/)

~~~
JustSomeNobody
"Sorry, we've temporarily run out of demo websites. Please try again soon! "

Interesting wording.

~~~
intellectronica
That's the HN effect. Demo sites are "pre-deployed" to make sure you get a
fresh individual site. Usually there are hundreds of them in the waiting but
looks like we've got very popular all of a sudden :)

If you'd like to give it a try and don't have patience to wait for a demo site
to become available, you can also register to Aldryn [
[http://www.aldryn.com/](http://www.aldryn.com/) ] (for free) and deploy your
own site with a few clicks.

~~~
austinjp
Slight side-track, but I'd be interested in your "pre-deployment" process.
Could you enlighten me, or point me somewhere I could find out? Thanks.

~~~
intellectronica
It works just like normal site deployment (prepare containers with the site
code and a database, etc, push it to cloud servers) but unlikely customer
sites that are controlled by, well, customers, the demo is always the same
site, so instead of making users wait for a deploy to start and finish when
they request a demo, we deploy a bunch of demo sites in the background and
when the user asks for a demo they just get one of the pre-deployed sites
(while in the background we start deploying a new one to add to the pool).

~~~
austinjp
Many thanks. What automation tools do you use, and how have you found them? If
you've already written about this I'm happy to be pointed elsewhere.

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DanieleProcida
A lot of people are talking about touch-screen support.

We don't want to dash anyone's expectations, but the release notes do advise:
"your Apple Watch is sadly unlikely to provide a very good django CMS editing
experience."

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astaroth360
Hmmm, my company has switched over to Wagtail at this point and they've been
happy with it. I'll have to look over new Django CMS and see what I think.

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kubrakovi
Awesome work on new release of Django CMS! Right now move content from old one
to new -> so huge difference. UI for content management works as a charm.

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ctmkpp
I searched for examples of websites built with Django CMS, and I saw that the
django-cms homepage already has a page dedicated to that: [http://www.django-
cms.org/en/case-studies/](http://www.django-cms.org/en/case-studies/)

Does anyone else have more examples? I am really curious about django-cms in
the wild.

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morgante
This is the first time I've seen Django CMS, but it looks interesting. How
hard is it to integrate into an existing Django site?

~~~
DanieleProcida
Dead easy. It's designed to do exactly that. See [http://docs.django-
cms.org/en/develop/how_to/install.html](http://docs.django-
cms.org/en/develop/how_to/install.html), which covers most of the bases in
some detail.

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mixmastamyk
I didn't get in yet, but this looks _very_ professional from the pics.

Is there any chance your admin forms could get into django proper? The stock
admin, while functional, doesn't look nearly as nice. Yes, I'm aware of the
new theme, but there's a lot more to it than just being flat.

~~~
jsmeaton
Without (yet) looking at the CMS admin I can tell you it likely won't. The
reason the new flat theme was accepted is because it was css-only changes.
Lots of people have customised their admin, so we can't just chop and change
the HTML without breaking backwards compatibility.

Releasing a theoretical django-cms-admin as a standalone package might be a
good idea, so you could at least take that bit if you don't want the entire
CMS.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Perhaps its time to start an admin2, if the old one is holding back progress?

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jbeja
If there any marketplace were one call sell Django Cms plugins or themes which
is profitable?

~~~
cbertschy
We have thoughts in that direction, so stay tuned :-)

~~~
ctmkpp
Exciting! I will contribute :)

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siwue
Looks nice! I'm looking forward to get the new version deployed for my website
soon.

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benzkji
mindblowing release!

~~~
cbertschy
thanks :-)

