16 ms·

Making Django CMS as easy to install as WordPress

212 points by DanieleProcida 10y ago

DanieleProcida 10y ago
Well if I'd known Hacker News was going to repunctuate my title I'd have done it differently!
- buckbova 10y ago
  But the title is "Making django CMS as easy to install as WordPress." Or did you just change it?
  - DanieleProcida 10y ago
    It removed an exclamation mark!
    - glogla 10y ago
      And now you're trying to make up for it!
- Flimm 10y ago
  I expect the mods will change the title to be closer to the original title, as this title sets the tone quite differently than the original article.
jbb555 10y ago
Does the advent of docker containers make creation and deployment of more complex systems as easy as wordpress? (I'm asking, I don't have any real experience of docker)
- jdavis703 10y ago
  Not for non-technical users. It's just another layer or abstraction.
- lojack 10y ago
  I would say not currently. If anything, I'd say that Docker can make creation and deployment of complex systems more complexed. There's various tools (and work on docker itself) to attempt to simplify this, but I'd say the tooling isn't quite there yet.
  - jmelett 10y ago
    Full disclosure: I work at Divio This is exactly where Divio comes in with the "Aldryn CLI" and "Aldryn Desktop App". The mentioned tools allow you replicate complex setups with a few simple clicks on your local machine, without having to learn the whole architecture of Docker & co. We'd love you to try it out for your feedback, it's a huge effort for us and it's been great to have the encouragement of the Django/Python communities, but when we start making traction with WordPress and PHP users we'll know we're really getting where we want.
    - soared 10y ago
      I'll give your platform a try soon. I've exclusively made wp sites because it is quick and easy to accomplish what I want, as long as it is simple. If you want to make traction with the wp crowd, you'll need a website redesign. Go to wordpress.com and there is literally a button that says "create website". Your website says "lifting django into the cloud". What the hell does that mean? (I know what it actually means). Sign up and deploy a site in the cloud? No... I just want to make a website. I don't want to deploy and sign up. etc. (I know its the same exact thing, your marketing will just have to change.)
      - DanieleProcida 10y ago
        OK, thanks! That's very interesting feedback.
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  Docker doesn't do it automatically, of course, but it makes it easier to to build systems that make easier deployment and hosting possible.
- busterarm 10y ago
  I'm a dev who came from the Rails world to a primarily Wordpress one in my current gig. Wordpress still has some pain points for me (schemaless database) that are only half-solved for me with plugins (mainly ACF Pro and Post To Post Links) and a lot of code. I've basically built a request router and ~MVC into Wordpress several times over, but not something I'm satisfied with enough to release to public. Most of the practices that we're used to elsewhere can be applied in the Wordpress space. Our build process relies on GitHub, Composer, Satis, CircleCI and Ansible (and we use Homestead locally). We use modern hosts who are amenable to git deployments so we don't have to use sftp. It took some work to get to here but it's easier. Honestly it's far easier than most of what I've had to deal with in the Rails space. Wordpress, for the right kind of sites, can be great to develop on. Truly great. And it's always great for content creators. I have yet to see another CMS deliver half that experience for content creators. Please, show me one -- so that I don't _HAVE_ to use Wordpress anymore. This gig has been interesting though. I see it as an opportunity to bring saner practices into the WordPress space. If anybody is going to LoopConf and wants to have a beer and a chat, let me know. Keep the plugins to a minimum and you'll have a great time.
  - 20years 10y ago
    "I've basically built a request router and ~MVC into Wordpress" That sounds really interesting and something I think a lot of devs would be interested in.
    - busterarm 10y ago
      I agree. A lot of folks have worked on the latter but I haven't seen much of the former and had to build it myself. In both cases what I did was highly specific to the spec of the WordPress site. I've yet to come up with something generic enough and well-built enough that I'm comfortable sharing. That's a problem with the WordPress ecosystem in general I think. The key moment to understanding Wordpress was realizing that its use of hooks and filters are the publish-subscribe pattern. You can just hook the `parse request` action and then do whatever the hell you like as long as you make sure that the `query` (and ultimately `wp` object) that comes out at the end of the process doesn't have something unexpected in it (tricky!)
- bluedino 10y ago
  Docker doesn't work on the cheap mass shared hosts.
  - collyw 10y ago
    No idea if it would work on Rackspace. Probably but it will be more hassle to get set up rather than less.
rampage101 10y ago
The difference in difficulty between Python/Django and WordPress is massive. To do Django you have to know Python, which is a big assumption. For Wordpress you need basically zero programming knowledge. Also compared to Flask, Django is much more complicated by making you adhere to their MVT (Model-View-Template).
- n0us 10y ago
  To be fair, Django doesn't make you adhere to that pattern and you can use Django any way you please. Django has a lot more "in the box" than Flask and I will agree that I think it's more difficult to get started with.
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    Not to mention that Django is a framework and WordPress is an application. It's like comparing a box of Legos with a box of unmolded plastic and then declaring that the former is easier to play with.
    - n0us 10y ago
      To continue with the analogy one might say that Django comes with the molds but you have to know how to use the furnace and how to make the bricks without them turning out crappy. Much greater potential because you can make whatever you want but also higher barriers to entry.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - rampage101 10y ago
    Yea you are correct. Just saying when you read a Django tutorial and they say a "View is not a View", meaning that the Django View is different... that is not exactly newbie friendly.
    - icebraining 10y ago
ycombinatorMan 10y ago
Just because it serves a purpose doesnt mean it shouldn't be criticized.
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  Do you mean WordPress? Sure, of course it shouldn't escape critical scrutiny, but people actually sneer at it (and PHP generally, and worse, at PHP programmers). There's a lot to learn from WordPress and PHP.
  - pen2l 10y ago
    I remember that I was snobbish about my Django skills... with my college buddy who would build Wordpress sites for a buck or two here and there. The guy is in Chicago right now and gets a lot of business from engineering firms. He is doing phenomenally well, he gets about 30-40k from (what appears to be) 20-40 hours of setting up fairly basic things with Wordpress. That guy taught me well about my being snobbish.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      WP is a classic worse-is-better icon. WP built a culture, which mostly works, not just a product, which - by any reasonable standard - is utter crap internally. Once you build a cultural monopoly, it's damn near impossible for a second mover to dismantle it. You have to wait for a new niche to colonise, or for WP to implode under the weight of its own awfulness. A new niche is hard to imagine in blog land, at least while we have today's web. And awful as it is, WP isn't quite so awful it's likely to implode. If it was, it would have done it by now. Your friend is making money because he's thinking like a business person who can offer a service, not like a developer who primarily thinks about tools, not cultures.
  - greenshackle 10y ago
    Among, say, the top 10 most used languages, PHP is easily the worst. I'm sure you can learn a lot from PHP/Wordpress, but everything has opportunity costs. You can learn better from better languages and frameworks. My shop does Python, Java, C and PHP. I know very good programmers who happen to write PHP for a living. They are the ones sneering at PHP the hardest.
mozumder 10y ago
Wordpress really screwed up by having a schema-less database. Everything in the database is a key-value pair. This means actual relational operations now need to be performed in PHP, instead of letting the RDBMS handle it. This significantly slows down the CMS, and so you have 1-2 second page response times. Meanwhile, my Django sites have response times in the 10-20ms range. (And that's without caching.)
- xrstf 10y ago
  "Everything is a key-value pair" is flat out wrong[1,2]: There are four key-value tables (commentmeta, postmeta, termmeta and usermeta), but most of the meat of Wordpress is stored in regular tables. [1] https://github.com/ronaldbradford/schema/blob/master/wordpress.sql https://github.com/ronaldbradford/schema/blob/master/wordpre... [2] https://codex.wordpress.org/images/2/25/WP4.4.2-ERD.png https://codex.wordpress.org/images/2/25/WP4.4.2-ERD.png [EDIT: Corrected myself about the number of KV tables]
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    if you're just using WP as a blog engine only, with basic functionality, you're fine. that's what it was built for, and shines. wp_options is a key/value table, and seems to be abused a lot. storing "transient" data in wp_options - what's up with that? why not at least have a 'transient' table, separate from the table that stores my ... options? and... when you've got plugin systems that store everything in postmeta... it's hard to do "normal" relational queries. woocommerce seems to be a good example of this - order info in postmeta? "find all orders in tennessee with more than $10 tax" can only be done with multiple self-joins on wp_postmeta. Perhaps they shouldn't have built it that way, but in my experience most plugin authors use what's provided, and what's provided makes them jump through hoops to do basic stuff, and is not well suited for larger scale apps (but people get suckered in to it anyway because it's "easy to get started"). Who do you blame for these decisions/mistakes? WP? Plugin authors? End users?
    - xrstf 10y ago
      I see your point and share your pain about key-value tables in SQL systems.
edem 10y ago
Being snobbish about WordPress is like being snobbish as a Windows user.
clifanatic 10y ago
I refuse not to be snobbish about WordPress.
- kolme 10y ago
  WordPress is a mess. It's a never ending source of problems. It'll save you some time upfront and then it'll cause many headaches later on. It's just better to stay away from it. It's not about being snobbish. It's just pointing out the truth.
  - tekklloneer 10y ago
    I have had the exact opposite experience. As long as you install one of the common security plugins (and not much else), then you're fine. And all those plugins do is ensure things like strong passwords and auth retry lockout. A large part of the problem comes from the many, buggy plugins you can one click install from within wordpress.
    - collyw 10y ago
      "A large part of the problem comes from the many, buggy plugins you can one click install from within wordpress." But isn't that the main benefit of Wordpress - the huge amount of plugins?
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        Yep. And laypeople (wordpress's main audience) are not in a position where they can figure out which plugins have dangerous bugs.
      - tekklloneer 10y ago
        The main benefit of wordpress for most users, as I see it, is a way to get simple, user friendly CMS onto their own domain. For me, it's for my handful of non technical users to be able to publish posts and have a central repo for sharing event information.
    - 10y ago
startupdiscuss 10y ago
This is a great contribution but it seems to be tied to a single vendor, and subject to the vendor's pricing. This is fine, fair, good etc. It is not a criticism of the service, but when digital ocean offers a one-click install of django-cms or mezzanine etc, I think we'll know it is in the mainstream.
- icc97 10y ago
  I love python, and Django is awesome, but to claim that the paid for Aldryn Cloud comes close to the WordPress.org 5 minute installation [1] is stretching it. It's not just about the time taken it's about the almost complete flexibility of any web server anywhere. The Aldryn Cloud is if anything similar to the WordPress.com setup where you just fill in a form and they handle the hosting for you. But WordPress.org had their 5-minute installation sorted out 10 years ago. N.B. That now along with the installation you have a complete choice of what language you want your entire system in. The amount of work that has been put into translation by WordPress and making sure that the entire rather huge ecosystem can be translated is phenomenal. They have some pretty good automated system testing for security flaws in the plugins that are submitted. I've witnessed what happens when one fails. They send you what the problem is and how to replicated it. Bare in mind all of this has been done through open source code with what I'd say is still done with companies that are run with very little greed. You won't find Mark Zuckerberg here answering questions on HN, but Matt Mullenweg has long been giving answers on here [2]. [1]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Min... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
  - startupdiscuss 10y ago
    You may have the advantage of having tried the Aldryn cloud. Have you tried Mezzanine? I heard that was even easier to set up, and might be a better candidate for a transition to 1 click.
onetwotree 10y ago
So, a reasonable question to ask is what can I recommend to non-technical people when they need a website quickly and inexpensively that won't make me feel like I'm setting them up to get owned? Also what advice should I give to WordPress users to help them improve security, other than the rather useless and bratty "don't use wordpress lol" answer? I'm a security professional and I follow the constant stream of "lol WordPress exploit" articles, but proactive security measures for WordPress are a bit outside my usual enterprise infrastructure work.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I still, currently, recommend WordPress, despite its flaws. I don't recommend doing ecommerce (directly) with it, or anything that could gather sensitive information, but for "just a website" with a bunch of cool stuff, WordPress is pretty much impossible to beat for the sheer amount of "cool stuff" you can do without ever writing code. The plugin ecosystem is tremendous. The automated updates, so far, mostly stay ahead of the curve on exploits in the wild. We have a large pool of users to draw information from (thousands of servers running all manner of web apps), and we're far more likely to see exploits of systems that are harder to update; Drupal, Joomla, and especially a bunch of little apps that have tiny market share and small maintenance teams and cranky update processes. Having an easy and automated system for updates is just incredibly valuable for security. What really needs to happen is everyone making web applications needs to start shipping a command line client for updates, that is safe/reliable enough to be run from cron. Best of both worlds: you don't need the app files to be write-able from the app itself (which is one of the big security concerns raised by this post) and you're always running the latest version even on systems that aren't being worked on daily. There's still the command line element to the problem, but it could be mostly automated away by control panels and installer tools (of which there are many). There are a lot of forgotten CMS installations out there, and those are the biggest security problem, IMHO.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    > I don't recommend doing ecommerce (directly) with it, or anything that could gather sensitive information, but for "just a website" with a bunch of cool stuff, WordPress is pretty much impossible to beat for the sheer amount of "cool stuff" you can do without ever writing code. Yes, basically don't store anything like this in the WordPress database. There are tons of services you can use, like Hubspot for forms, that allow you to abstract all of these things away from your site and still use WordPress.
2pointsomone 10y ago
So I critiqued the Aldryn Cloud solution and Django CMS's approach on the Disqus comments on their blogpost and it was swiftly rejected. This product is far from the values of open source Wordpress is built on.
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  Your comment (if it's the one) was simply waiting to be approved in Disqus moderation. We won't reject comments unless they are offensively rude, spam, wildly off-topic or otherwise significantly problematic. We can withstand a little bit of criticism...
  - 2pointsomone 10y ago
    Got it. I saw that a newer comment was approved so I assumed mine was rejected. Apologies for that! I think the newer comment that was approved was probably just from an account that wasn't moderated.
DjangoPress 10y ago
I know both systems and will not fight for one or the other. I will try to summarize the most annoying points in both systems. Many things in WordPress are brilliant, and none of the Django content management systems got that right. Every WordPress user can very quickly learn to actually manage their content with taxonomies (categories, tags, or custom made ones), and then build e.g. a menu or special pages for a category very easy out of that categorizations. This is brilliant. Also the hook system is great, so easy to add and combine pieces of code, one of the reasons for that enormous amount of plugins (of course not all of them are of good quality, ahem). Also the extremely easy extension via custom post types and custom fields allows to build a lot of things very quickly. Try to build dynamic models with Django - a major limitation that is seldom talked about, but very important. This is one of the most boneheaded Django dead-ends that I have hit - how can a system that is build for dynamic content generation make it so hard to dynamically define and generate models? There are some approaches, but you are getting into 'fight-the-system-mode' with all of them, because that boneheadism is build into the basic design of Django. Of course, the code base of WordPress is very old and a constant source of trouble, if you are depressed, go and read some WP code, you will have fun, I swear! But it must be said that it is really great how the WP devs keep up backwards compatibility - you can run and update the system for years without worries, this is very important for a cms! Django devs did not understand that. So many people are lagging behind with updating their Django apps / projects, because the django devs missed this most important point! So many changing things, stupid little things, but breaking and mutating like a radioactive godzilla, you see the results in a universe of incompatible django apps. They missed completely that it is a good thing to "never break user space", really a problem here. Do not change the API! Thanks god they started to do that LTS thing now, so there is some hope now that serious enterprise business will take a look at Django. Luckily WordPress now has automatic updates, so admins do not have to panic so much. Biggest problem, of course, is that annoying dependency on MySQL, I hate it, and I also hate the catastrophic generation of sql queries - and do not even try to look at the mysql query log when you install the super-bonehead-ultra plugin by mister uberhaxor! But caching is mandatory anyway, or even better, export to static pages. Do not even put that WP on the internet - let authors write to an isolated environment and export all the pages into a static cache after updates. Do not allow comments. If only all these great WP ideas were implemented on top of Django, that would be perfect. But all the existing Django CMS are extremely far away from the easy WordPress usability. Like WP was made by artists and all the Django CMS made by bureaucrats. Wagtail has some future, but is still missing many, many features, also I see some problems with the content model, having to define a new model for each new type of content will not work in the long run - they are hitting that annoying Django design limitation here - it is not a framework build for dynamic models (eat that absurdism!). There must be something inherently wrong with Django that it seems not to be possible to build a feature-rich CMS that tops WP easily - everything that exists is extremely beyond the state of the art, unfortunately, and I wonder if that has some reason connected to Django. Any PHP project would have millions of plugins after such a long time (working and compatible) - meanwhile you can be happy if you find a Django app that works out of the box with the latest Django release, lots of bitrot. Even the demo apps sometimes do not work, try to run the mezzanine 'drum' hacker news clone. This must be a management problem, but I do not understand these things, however that problem exists and it is annoying. You are riding high he Django train, but fall deep with non-working apps all the time, this can be even worse than the WP plugin hell. WordPress is technically inferior, but there are so many brilliant ideas in there. Django, technically superior in any way, still misses anything like WP, none of the CMS come close to the WordPress experience. In other words: there is still room for innovation! Just compare for yourself, looking at any of the Django CMS in 2016 will be like a time travel back to 2010. Today I hope that some people will re-implement WordPress with Elixir and the great Phoenix framework. The Django Channels project will not be enough to survive that.
pbreit 10y ago
No matter the author's contention, PHP apps are still much easier to install which is pretty much the sole reason for PHP's original and continuing popularity.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  Exactly - every £2pcm shared hosting plan allows PHP, you need to actively look elsewhere for something "more exotic", and know what you should be looking for to begin with...
DanieleProcida 10y ago
Just to gather some of the other comments together, if you're a Django developer already, then you're used to more difficult deployments. So anything that goes in the direction of easier (WordPress-style if you wish) deployments is going to be a big bonus for the Python/Django developers who are already committed to the language or the framework, and is going to be a big win for the service that can provide it. I don't think I am giving away any of grand secrets if I say that that's what we're doing (and trying to do more of) - be a first choice for Django/Python developers. For the Django developers, it doesn't need to be as easy as WordPress - it just needs to be easier than the other options (which seem to begin with hammering bits together by hand until you have a working server, sometimes). (That may not be enough to bring in users who may have gone for WordPress, but that's a further ambition.) In the meantime, easiness really is important, which is why I think there is so much to learn from WordPress's success, but ease-of-deployment is definitely not the only thing that's important. For example, I don't think it's an unfair comment to say that one flaw WordPress has is security, and that Django/django CMS/Aldryn are much more secure, and that alone should be something people think about. Or: there's more to hosting than dumping some files into a web server's directory. New deployment technologies such as Docker make it possible for a Django site built on Aldryn to be taken away and hosted somewhere else in minutes - being able to migrate your deployments if you wish to isn't an eye-catching advantage, but it's really valuable from a business point of view. Or yet again, Docker makes it possible for a cloud hosting platform such as ours to be way more than just a hosting or deployment platform. It's also a development platform, with tools that integrate the desktop and the cloud and make the work of the experienced application developer easier, not just that of the non-technical person who wants a new site. Anyway, that's a slightly long-winded way of saying that the lesson from WordPress is extremely valuable, but the way it applies to Django doesn't mean that we have to compete on WordPress's terms!
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  If you want an easy one click set up for Django, ansible's a much better approach than docker.
limeyy 10y ago
The only truth about Wordpress being so successful is its theme availability. Envato can for sure be responsible partially for its success. It's not that Wordpress is good, or great or that much extensible. One could easily look for ExpressionEngine or Craft, if that would be the case. But if you want a 1-click install, plus slap a 50$ theme on it, and your stuff to look pretty good, Wordpress is a viable solution. However, if you want to customise stuff yourself, things become really dreadful very quickly. Anyone saying otherwise, hasn't done so. All the other stuff, about any of its "goodness" as addressed here in the article, is basically the author doesn't knowing any better, what a real CMS is supposed to do.
- simbalion 10y ago
  It's not especially difficult to customize a wordpress theme. At some point people who are not developers need to hand the reigns over to developers. I often see posts from people asking someone to teach them PHP in a few days so they can modify their Wordpress install, and I think why would anyone who's spent 2 decades learning how to do these things for their bread and butter want to do that? If developing is your career then you've got time to learn, and if you don't got time to learn then pay someone who's made it their career.
- busterarm 10y ago
  > However, if you want to customise stuff yourself, things become really dreadful very quickly. Anyone saying otherwise, hasn't done so. Before I understood hooks & filters as publish-subscribe? sure. Afterwards? No way. Do you want to know what's dreadful? Having a content team that needs to build 10k pages of content in a Rails site. Do you know what's not dreadful? Having a content team that needs to build 10k pages of content on WordPress. The latter can be supported by just me. The former? I don't even know.
dempseye 10y ago
Do you see real economic opportunities in the Django-CMS space that will lead to people investing effort in it and improving it to the point where it is an option for the kind of people who use Wordpress?
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  At the moment, the WordPress market economy is based largely on small margins over very large quantities. django CMS definitely isn't in that space, or even aiming for it, right now. In the meantime though, we know that django CMS is a serious choice of Python/Django agencies and large corporations and other organisations. You can see django CMS mentioned in job advertisements on a regular basis. A surprising number of large corporate websites use django CMS. There are numerous businesses in Europe and the USA that are django CMS specialists, building websites including CMS components for their clients, all based on django CMS. django CMS is a free open-source product, but has paid developers working on it full-time. Finally, it's sufficiently well-known and well-used to warrant the creation of Aldryn, a cloud deployment platform that was built around serving django CMS (even if now it also serves Django more widely). Again, it's not the scale of economy that exists around WordPress (but then what is?), and there are many things that we hope will grow over the next few years, such as a thriving marketplace of not just free open-source but also paid-for addon applications, and even competitors to Aldryn. So the answer is yes, in a word.
  - dempseye 10y ago
    Thanks for your response.
kureikain 10y ago
I don't see why Django CMS will be more secure than WordPress or other way. From a coding point of view, the more people works on it, the more chance the security issue will be noticed and fixed. Rails, Django or any framework in general always have security issues at some time. The issue of WordPress is come from the easy to use. The ability to install plugin require write permission from the user that run WordPress. Second, many WordPress plugin expose executable-php file in plugin folder that is invokeable via hitting directly that url. So if Django CMS has that ability, allow downloading 3rd-code and run it, I'm not sure if it's more secure than WordPress. WordPress is just as secure as any Rails or Django app. Bug happens, people fix.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- est 10y ago
  > Rails, Django or any framework in general always have security issues at some time. No. Rails & Django have vast smaller attack surface than PHP's default.
  - lima 10y ago
    Also, when was the last time you could compromise a Django install or even get remote code execution?
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  It's ironic that what's behind WordPress's fabled ease-of-deployment (i.e. allowing third-party code to be downloaded an executed) is also what's behind many of its security weaknesses. Doing that is pretty much impossible in Django.
- acoard 10y ago
  Shopify's EmbeddedSDK does plugins (or "apps") very securely, but it comes at a development price. Instead of getting write access and running code on the server directly, you basically interact with an API via an embedded web page. Basically an Iframe. The API is more secure than getting to execute arbitrary code; but it is more restricting as a developer. Not perfect, but much better.
oliwarner 10y ago
Installation isn't even half the battle. Updates are the killer thing in the Python world that even seasoned Django devs (raises hand) get wrong every so often. Sure, you can `pip install -Ur requirements.txt` but will it work? Do I need to set up continuous integration? Testing servers? What happens when there are backwards incompatibilities between elements? As things are you need a Django dev on staff to run a Django website. There is no dev-deploy-dump process that Wordpress "designers" get to enjoy. It's constant. To really compete, Django (not just Django CMS, IMO) needs environment monitoring, testing and upgrading baked in. Many will argue that it's not its job —and they aren't wrong— but nobody else seems to be willing to do this in a way that anything but a seasoned programmer capable of running.
rebootthesystem 10y ago
Can I use Aldryn on Linode? Does it come up with full email installed? Today you can go to GoDaddy, rent a VPS relatively cheap, fire-up a Wordpress install and be up and running with a website and full email service for a small business inside of one hour. Attempting to achieve the same with Phython/Django/Django-CMS on something like a Linode is an exercise of frustration. I love Python/Django yet, more often than not, I have no choice but to point people towards Wordpress. ...and then there's the Python 2.x/3.x mess...
neokya 10y ago
I really want Aldryn to succeed. I have tried to test it out, and my major issue is documentation and not so clear UI. For example, it's not clear to me how can I clone project I created on Aldryn and work on local. It's been about 10 minutes I am clicking around, still can't figure it out. Do I have to use Mac app? Can I work on as usual Django project on command line and just do git push when ready? Even docs here isn't clear to me http://support.divio.com/hc/en-us/categories/200815715-Local-development http://support.divio.com/hc/en-us/categories/200815715-Local... Btw, that django cms demo with Aldryn boilerplate is kick ass. Edit: After lots of clicking, I found how to install aldryn client. pip install aldryn-client
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  If you're having any trouble getting to grips with it, don't hesitate to drop us a line - on our live help system if you wish: https://www.divio.com/en/#intercom https://www.divio.com/en/#intercom Otherwise, both https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-website-without-knowing-python-django-part-one/ https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit... and the Guided Tour https://www.divio.com/en/academy/aldryn-cloud-django-cms-guided-tour/ https://www.divio.com/en/academy/aldryn-cloud-django-cms-gui... will help.
brianmurphy 10y ago
Vanilla WordPress may be the wrong target when trying to design for ease of use. Page builders have superseded the TinyMCE "visual" page/post editor. Beaverbuilder is the most talked about modern page builder at the WordPress meetups I attend. Try to build a homepage layout like airbnb.com with your tutorial and again with beaverbuilder. You will find a huge technical difference.
dtougas 10y ago
I am a Python/Django developer. I am not a WordPress fan, but I am not above recommending it to people, provided that they understand what they are getting into. This is what I generally tell people... - WordPress as an 90/10 solution: You can get 90% of what you want for 10% of the effort, and you don't have to be a programmer to get most of the way. It is that last 10% that will suck 90% of your time, and it won't be pretty. In fact, it will probably be terrible and (as a developer) you will feel very icky about yourself when it is done. If you can be satisfied with getting close-to-but-not-quite what you want, then you will probably be happy with WordPress. If you are very particular about that last 10%, then you will probably be in for a world of pain. It may end-up costing just as much (or sometimes even be cheaper) to go with a custom/Django solution in those cases. - WordPress works well as a basic publishing platform. That was what it was designed for, and that is it's sweet spot. It isn't however ideally suited to application development. The further you head down the path of trying to make WordPress behave outside of the standard content publishing paradigm, the more painful and difficult it will become. - You absolutely have to stay on top of security and updates. If you aren't willing to spend that time, then you will end-up paying for all the time you saved when you set things up by having to deal with security fallout. I recognize the appeal and place that WordPress has in the marketplace. I also recognize that people that need it are not my target clients. I have learned that my sweet spot for development is to fill the niche where WordPress isn't a great option.

212 points by DanieleProcida 10y ago

DanieleProcida 10y ago

Well if I'd known Hacker News was going to repunctuate my title I'd have done it differently!

buckbova 10y ago
But the title is "Making django CMS as easy to install as WordPress." Or did you just change it?
- DanieleProcida 10y ago
  It removed an exclamation mark!
  - glogla 10y ago
    And now you're trying to make up for it!
Flimm 10y ago
I expect the mods will change the title to be closer to the original title, as this title sets the tone quite differently than the original article.

jbb555 10y ago

Does the advent of docker containers make creation and deployment of more complex systems as easy as wordpress? (I'm asking, I don't have any real experience of docker)

jdavis703 10y ago
Not for non-technical users. It's just another layer or abstraction.
lojack 10y ago
I would say not currently. If anything, I'd say that Docker can make creation and deployment of complex systems more complexed. There's various tools (and work on docker itself) to attempt to simplify this, but I'd say the tooling isn't quite there yet.
- jmelett 10y ago
  Full disclosure: I work at Divio This is exactly where Divio comes in with the "Aldryn CLI" and "Aldryn Desktop App". The mentioned tools allow you replicate complex setups with a few simple clicks on your local machine, without having to learn the whole architecture of Docker & co. We'd love you to try it out for your feedback, it's a huge effort for us and it's been great to have the encouragement of the Django/Python communities, but when we start making traction with WordPress and PHP users we'll know we're really getting where we want.
  - soared 10y ago
    I'll give your platform a try soon. I've exclusively made wp sites because it is quick and easy to accomplish what I want, as long as it is simple. If you want to make traction with the wp crowd, you'll need a website redesign. Go to wordpress.com and there is literally a button that says "create website". Your website says "lifting django into the cloud". What the hell does that mean? (I know what it actually means). Sign up and deploy a site in the cloud? No... I just want to make a website. I don't want to deploy and sign up. etc. (I know its the same exact thing, your marketing will just have to change.)
    - DanieleProcida 10y ago
      OK, thanks! That's very interesting feedback.
DanieleProcida 10y ago
Docker doesn't do it automatically, of course, but it makes it easier to to build systems that make easier deployment and hosting possible.
busterarm 10y ago
I'm a dev who came from the Rails world to a primarily Wordpress one in my current gig. Wordpress still has some pain points for me (schemaless database) that are only half-solved for me with plugins (mainly ACF Pro and Post To Post Links) and a lot of code. I've basically built a request router and ~MVC into Wordpress several times over, but not something I'm satisfied with enough to release to public. Most of the practices that we're used to elsewhere can be applied in the Wordpress space. Our build process relies on GitHub, Composer, Satis, CircleCI and Ansible (and we use Homestead locally). We use modern hosts who are amenable to git deployments so we don't have to use sftp. It took some work to get to here but it's easier. Honestly it's far easier than most of what I've had to deal with in the Rails space. Wordpress, for the right kind of sites, can be great to develop on. Truly great. And it's always great for content creators. I have yet to see another CMS deliver half that experience for content creators. Please, show me one -- so that I don't _HAVE_ to use Wordpress anymore. This gig has been interesting though. I see it as an opportunity to bring saner practices into the WordPress space. If anybody is going to LoopConf and wants to have a beer and a chat, let me know. Keep the plugins to a minimum and you'll have a great time.
- 20years 10y ago
  "I've basically built a request router and ~MVC into Wordpress" That sounds really interesting and something I think a lot of devs would be interested in.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    I agree. A lot of folks have worked on the latter but I haven't seen much of the former and had to build it myself. In both cases what I did was highly specific to the spec of the WordPress site. I've yet to come up with something generic enough and well-built enough that I'm comfortable sharing. That's a problem with the WordPress ecosystem in general I think. The key moment to understanding Wordpress was realizing that its use of hooks and filters are the publish-subscribe pattern. You can just hook the `parse request` action and then do whatever the hell you like as long as you make sure that the `query` (and ultimately `wp` object) that comes out at the end of the process doesn't have something unexpected in it (tricky!)
bluedino 10y ago
Docker doesn't work on the cheap mass shared hosts.
- collyw 10y ago
  No idea if it would work on Rackspace. Probably but it will be more hassle to get set up rather than less.

rampage101 10y ago

The difference in difficulty between Python/Django and WordPress is massive. To do Django you have to know Python, which is a big assumption. For Wordpress you need basically zero programming knowledge. Also compared to Flask, Django is much more complicated by making you adhere to their MVT (Model-View-Template).

n0us 10y ago
To be fair, Django doesn't make you adhere to that pattern and you can use Django any way you please. Django has a lot more "in the box" than Flask and I will agree that I think it's more difficult to get started with.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  Not to mention that Django is a framework and WordPress is an application. It's like comparing a box of Legos with a box of unmolded plastic and then declaring that the former is easier to play with.
  - n0us 10y ago
    To continue with the analogy one might say that Django comes with the molds but you have to know how to use the furnace and how to make the bricks without them turning out crappy. Much greater potential because you can make whatever you want but also higher barriers to entry.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- rampage101 10y ago
  Yea you are correct. Just saying when you read a Django tutorial and they say a "View is not a View", meaning that the Django View is different... that is not exactly newbie friendly.
  - icebraining 10y ago

ycombinatorMan 10y ago

Just because it serves a purpose doesnt mean it shouldn't be criticized.

DanieleProcida 10y ago
Do you mean WordPress? Sure, of course it shouldn't escape critical scrutiny, but people actually sneer at it (and PHP generally, and worse, at PHP programmers). There's a lot to learn from WordPress and PHP.
- pen2l 10y ago
  I remember that I was snobbish about my Django skills... with my college buddy who would build Wordpress sites for a buck or two here and there. The guy is in Chicago right now and gets a lot of business from engineering firms. He is doing phenomenally well, he gets about 30-40k from (what appears to be) 20-40 hours of setting up fairly basic things with Wordpress. That guy taught me well about my being snobbish.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    WP is a classic worse-is-better icon. WP built a culture, which mostly works, not just a product, which - by any reasonable standard - is utter crap internally. Once you build a cultural monopoly, it's damn near impossible for a second mover to dismantle it. You have to wait for a new niche to colonise, or for WP to implode under the weight of its own awfulness. A new niche is hard to imagine in blog land, at least while we have today's web. And awful as it is, WP isn't quite so awful it's likely to implode. If it was, it would have done it by now. Your friend is making money because he's thinking like a business person who can offer a service, not like a developer who primarily thinks about tools, not cultures.
- greenshackle 10y ago
  Among, say, the top 10 most used languages, PHP is easily the worst. I'm sure you can learn a lot from PHP/Wordpress, but everything has opportunity costs. You can learn better from better languages and frameworks. My shop does Python, Java, C and PHP. I know very good programmers who happen to write PHP for a living. They are the ones sneering at PHP the hardest.

mozumder 10y ago

Wordpress really screwed up by having a schema-less database. Everything in the database is a key-value pair. This means actual relational operations now need to be performed in PHP, instead of letting the RDBMS handle it. This significantly slows down the CMS, and so you have 1-2 second page response times. Meanwhile, my Django sites have response times in the 10-20ms range. (And that's without caching.)

xrstf 10y ago
"Everything is a key-value pair" is flat out wrong[1,2]: There are four key-value tables (commentmeta, postmeta, termmeta and usermeta), but most of the meat of Wordpress is stored in regular tables. [1] https://github.com/ronaldbradford/schema/blob/master/wordpress.sql https://github.com/ronaldbradford/schema/blob/master/wordpre... [2] https://codex.wordpress.org/images/2/25/WP4.4.2-ERD.png https://codex.wordpress.org/images/2/25/WP4.4.2-ERD.png [EDIT: Corrected myself about the number of KV tables]
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  if you're just using WP as a blog engine only, with basic functionality, you're fine. that's what it was built for, and shines. wp_options is a key/value table, and seems to be abused a lot. storing "transient" data in wp_options - what's up with that? why not at least have a 'transient' table, separate from the table that stores my ... options? and... when you've got plugin systems that store everything in postmeta... it's hard to do "normal" relational queries. woocommerce seems to be a good example of this - order info in postmeta? "find all orders in tennessee with more than $10 tax" can only be done with multiple self-joins on wp_postmeta. Perhaps they shouldn't have built it that way, but in my experience most plugin authors use what's provided, and what's provided makes them jump through hoops to do basic stuff, and is not well suited for larger scale apps (but people get suckered in to it anyway because it's "easy to get started"). Who do you blame for these decisions/mistakes? WP? Plugin authors? End users?
  - xrstf 10y ago
    I see your point and share your pain about key-value tables in SQL systems.

edem 10y ago

Being snobbish about WordPress is like being snobbish as a Windows user.

clifanatic 10y ago

I refuse not to be snobbish about WordPress.

kolme 10y ago
WordPress is a mess. It's a never ending source of problems. It'll save you some time upfront and then it'll cause many headaches later on. It's just better to stay away from it. It's not about being snobbish. It's just pointing out the truth.
- tekklloneer 10y ago
  I have had the exact opposite experience. As long as you install one of the common security plugins (and not much else), then you're fine. And all those plugins do is ensure things like strong passwords and auth retry lockout. A large part of the problem comes from the many, buggy plugins you can one click install from within wordpress.
  - collyw 10y ago
    "A large part of the problem comes from the many, buggy plugins you can one click install from within wordpress." But isn't that the main benefit of Wordpress - the huge amount of plugins?
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      Yep. And laypeople (wordpress's main audience) are not in a position where they can figure out which plugins have dangerous bugs.
    - tekklloneer 10y ago
      The main benefit of wordpress for most users, as I see it, is a way to get simple, user friendly CMS onto their own domain. For me, it's for my handful of non technical users to be able to publish posts and have a central repo for sharing event information.
  - 10y ago

startupdiscuss 10y ago

This is a great contribution but it seems to be tied to a single vendor, and subject to the vendor's pricing. This is fine, fair, good etc. It is not a criticism of the service, but when digital ocean offers a one-click install of django-cms or mezzanine etc, I think we'll know it is in the mainstream.

icc97 10y ago
I love python, and Django is awesome, but to claim that the paid for Aldryn Cloud comes close to the WordPress.org 5 minute installation [1] is stretching it. It's not just about the time taken it's about the almost complete flexibility of any web server anywhere. The Aldryn Cloud is if anything similar to the WordPress.com setup where you just fill in a form and they handle the hosting for you. But WordPress.org had their 5-minute installation sorted out 10 years ago. N.B. That now along with the installation you have a complete choice of what language you want your entire system in. The amount of work that has been put into translation by WordPress and making sure that the entire rather huge ecosystem can be translated is phenomenal. They have some pretty good automated system testing for security flaws in the plugins that are submitted. I've witnessed what happens when one fails. They send you what the problem is and how to replicated it. Bare in mind all of this has been done through open source code with what I'd say is still done with companies that are run with very little greed. You won't find Mark Zuckerberg here answering questions on HN, but Matt Mullenweg has long been giving answers on here [2]. [1]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Min... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
- startupdiscuss 10y ago
  You may have the advantage of having tried the Aldryn cloud. Have you tried Mezzanine? I heard that was even easier to set up, and might be a better candidate for a transition to 1 click.

onetwotree 10y ago

So, a reasonable question to ask is what can I recommend to non-technical people when they need a website quickly and inexpensively that won't make me feel like I'm setting them up to get owned? Also what advice should I give to WordPress users to help them improve security, other than the rather useless and bratty "don't use wordpress lol" answer? I'm a security professional and I follow the constant stream of "lol WordPress exploit" articles, but proactive security measures for WordPress are a bit outside my usual enterprise infrastructure work.

SwellJoe 10y ago
I still, currently, recommend WordPress, despite its flaws. I don't recommend doing ecommerce (directly) with it, or anything that could gather sensitive information, but for "just a website" with a bunch of cool stuff, WordPress is pretty much impossible to beat for the sheer amount of "cool stuff" you can do without ever writing code. The plugin ecosystem is tremendous. The automated updates, so far, mostly stay ahead of the curve on exploits in the wild. We have a large pool of users to draw information from (thousands of servers running all manner of web apps), and we're far more likely to see exploits of systems that are harder to update; Drupal, Joomla, and especially a bunch of little apps that have tiny market share and small maintenance teams and cranky update processes. Having an easy and automated system for updates is just incredibly valuable for security. What really needs to happen is everyone making web applications needs to start shipping a command line client for updates, that is safe/reliable enough to be run from cron. Best of both worlds: you don't need the app files to be write-able from the app itself (which is one of the big security concerns raised by this post) and you're always running the latest version even on systems that aren't being worked on daily. There's still the command line element to the problem, but it could be mostly automated away by control panels and installer tools (of which there are many). There are a lot of forgotten CMS installations out there, and those are the biggest security problem, IMHO.
- busterarm 10y ago
  > I don't recommend doing ecommerce (directly) with it, or anything that could gather sensitive information, but for "just a website" with a bunch of cool stuff, WordPress is pretty much impossible to beat for the sheer amount of "cool stuff" you can do without ever writing code. Yes, basically don't store anything like this in the WordPress database. There are tons of services you can use, like Hubspot for forms, that allow you to abstract all of these things away from your site and still use WordPress.

2pointsomone 10y ago

So I critiqued the Aldryn Cloud solution and Django CMS's approach on the Disqus comments on their blogpost and it was swiftly rejected. This product is far from the values of open source Wordpress is built on.

DanieleProcida 10y ago
Your comment (if it's the one) was simply waiting to be approved in Disqus moderation. We won't reject comments unless they are offensively rude, spam, wildly off-topic or otherwise significantly problematic. We can withstand a little bit of criticism...
- 2pointsomone 10y ago
  Got it. I saw that a newer comment was approved so I assumed mine was rejected. Apologies for that! I think the newer comment that was approved was probably just from an account that wasn't moderated.

DjangoPress 10y ago

I know both systems and will not fight for one or the other. I will try to summarize the most annoying points in both systems. Many things in WordPress are brilliant, and none of the Django content management systems got that right. Every WordPress user can very quickly learn to actually manage their content with taxonomies (categories, tags, or custom made ones), and then build e.g. a menu or special pages for a category very easy out of that categorizations. This is brilliant. Also the hook system is great, so easy to add and combine pieces of code, one of the reasons for that enormous amount of plugins (of course not all of them are of good quality, ahem). Also the extremely easy extension via custom post types and custom fields allows to build a lot of things very quickly. Try to build dynamic models with Django - a major limitation that is seldom talked about, but very important. This is one of the most boneheaded Django dead-ends that I have hit - how can a system that is build for dynamic content generation make it so hard to dynamically define and generate models? There are some approaches, but you are getting into 'fight-the-system-mode' with all of them, because that boneheadism is build into the basic design of Django. Of course, the code base of WordPress is very old and a constant source of trouble, if you are depressed, go and read some WP code, you will have fun, I swear! But it must be said that it is really great how the WP devs keep up backwards compatibility - you can run and update the system for years without worries, this is very important for a cms! Django devs did not understand that. So many people are lagging behind with updating their Django apps / projects, because the django devs missed this most important point! So many changing things, stupid little things, but breaking and mutating like a radioactive godzilla, you see the results in a universe of incompatible django apps. They missed completely that it is a good thing to "never break user space", really a problem here. Do not change the API! Thanks god they started to do that LTS thing now, so there is some hope now that serious enterprise business will take a look at Django. Luckily WordPress now has automatic updates, so admins do not have to panic so much. Biggest problem, of course, is that annoying dependency on MySQL, I hate it, and I also hate the catastrophic generation of sql queries - and do not even try to look at the mysql query log when you install the super-bonehead-ultra plugin by mister uberhaxor! But caching is mandatory anyway, or even better, export to static pages. Do not even put that WP on the internet - let authors write to an isolated environment and export all the pages into a static cache after updates. Do not allow comments. If only all these great WP ideas were implemented on top of Django, that would be perfect. But all the existing Django CMS are extremely far away from the easy WordPress usability. Like WP was made by artists and all the Django CMS made by bureaucrats. Wagtail has some future, but is still missing many, many features, also I see some problems with the content model, having to define a new model for each new type of content will not work in the long run - they are hitting that annoying Django design limitation here - it is not a framework build for dynamic models (eat that absurdism!). There must be something inherently wrong with Django that it seems not to be possible to build a feature-rich CMS that tops WP easily - everything that exists is extremely beyond the state of the art, unfortunately, and I wonder if that has some reason connected to Django. Any PHP project would have millions of plugins after such a long time (working and compatible) - meanwhile you can be happy if you find a Django app that works out of the box with the latest Django release, lots of bitrot. Even the demo apps sometimes do not work, try to run the mezzanine 'drum' hacker news clone. This must be a management problem, but I do not understand these things, however that problem exists and it is annoying. You are riding high he Django train, but fall deep with non-working apps all the time, this can be even worse than the WP plugin hell. WordPress is technically inferior, but there are so many brilliant ideas in there. Django, technically superior in any way, still misses anything like WP, none of the CMS come close to the WordPress experience. In other words: there is still room for innovation! Just compare for yourself, looking at any of the Django CMS in 2016 will be like a time travel back to 2010. Today I hope that some people will re-implement WordPress with Elixir and the great Phoenix framework. The Django Channels project will not be enough to survive that.

pbreit 10y ago

No matter the author's contention, PHP apps are still much easier to install which is pretty much the sole reason for PHP's original and continuing popularity.

wastedhours 10y ago
Exactly - every £2pcm shared hosting plan allows PHP, you need to actively look elsewhere for something "more exotic", and know what you should be looking for to begin with...

DanieleProcida 10y ago

Just to gather some of the other comments together, if you're a Django developer already, then you're used to more difficult deployments. So anything that goes in the direction of easier (WordPress-style if you wish) deployments is going to be a big bonus for the Python/Django developers who are already committed to the language or the framework, and is going to be a big win for the service that can provide it. I don't think I am giving away any of grand secrets if I say that that's what we're doing (and trying to do more of) - be a first choice for Django/Python developers. For the Django developers, it doesn't need to be as easy as WordPress - it just needs to be easier than the other options (which seem to begin with hammering bits together by hand until you have a working server, sometimes). (That may not be enough to bring in users who may have gone for WordPress, but that's a further ambition.) In the meantime, easiness really is important, which is why I think there is so much to learn from WordPress's success, but ease-of-deployment is definitely not the only thing that's important. For example, I don't think it's an unfair comment to say that one flaw WordPress has is security, and that Django/django CMS/Aldryn are much more secure, and that alone should be something people think about. Or: there's more to hosting than dumping some files into a web server's directory. New deployment technologies such as Docker make it possible for a Django site built on Aldryn to be taken away and hosted somewhere else in minutes - being able to migrate your deployments if you wish to isn't an eye-catching advantage, but it's really valuable from a business point of view. Or yet again, Docker makes it possible for a cloud hosting platform such as ours to be way more than just a hosting or deployment platform. It's also a development platform, with tools that integrate the desktop and the cloud and make the work of the experienced application developer easier, not just that of the non-technical person who wants a new site. Anyway, that's a slightly long-winded way of saying that the lesson from WordPress is extremely valuable, but the way it applies to Django doesn't mean that we have to compete on WordPress's terms!

crdoconnor 10y ago
If you want an easy one click set up for Django, ansible's a much better approach than docker.

limeyy 10y ago

The only truth about Wordpress being so successful is its theme availability. Envato can for sure be responsible partially for its success. It's not that Wordpress is good, or great or that much extensible. One could easily look for ExpressionEngine or Craft, if that would be the case. But if you want a 1-click install, plus slap a 50$ theme on it, and your stuff to look pretty good, Wordpress is a viable solution. However, if you want to customise stuff yourself, things become really dreadful very quickly. Anyone saying otherwise, hasn't done so. All the other stuff, about any of its "goodness" as addressed here in the article, is basically the author doesn't knowing any better, what a real CMS is supposed to do.

simbalion 10y ago
It's not especially difficult to customize a wordpress theme. At some point people who are not developers need to hand the reigns over to developers. I often see posts from people asking someone to teach them PHP in a few days so they can modify their Wordpress install, and I think why would anyone who's spent 2 decades learning how to do these things for their bread and butter want to do that? If developing is your career then you've got time to learn, and if you don't got time to learn then pay someone who's made it their career.
busterarm 10y ago
> However, if you want to customise stuff yourself, things become really dreadful very quickly. Anyone saying otherwise, hasn't done so. Before I understood hooks & filters as publish-subscribe? sure. Afterwards? No way. Do you want to know what's dreadful? Having a content team that needs to build 10k pages of content in a Rails site. Do you know what's not dreadful? Having a content team that needs to build 10k pages of content on WordPress. The latter can be supported by just me. The former? I don't even know.

dempseye 10y ago

Do you see real economic opportunities in the Django-CMS space that will lead to people investing effort in it and improving it to the point where it is an option for the kind of people who use Wordpress?

DanieleProcida 10y ago
At the moment, the WordPress market economy is based largely on small margins over very large quantities. django CMS definitely isn't in that space, or even aiming for it, right now. In the meantime though, we know that django CMS is a serious choice of Python/Django agencies and large corporations and other organisations. You can see django CMS mentioned in job advertisements on a regular basis. A surprising number of large corporate websites use django CMS. There are numerous businesses in Europe and the USA that are django CMS specialists, building websites including CMS components for their clients, all based on django CMS. django CMS is a free open-source product, but has paid developers working on it full-time. Finally, it's sufficiently well-known and well-used to warrant the creation of Aldryn, a cloud deployment platform that was built around serving django CMS (even if now it also serves Django more widely). Again, it's not the scale of economy that exists around WordPress (but then what is?), and there are many things that we hope will grow over the next few years, such as a thriving marketplace of not just free open-source but also paid-for addon applications, and even competitors to Aldryn. So the answer is yes, in a word.
- dempseye 10y ago
  Thanks for your response.

kureikain 10y ago

I don't see why Django CMS will be more secure than WordPress or other way. From a coding point of view, the more people works on it, the more chance the security issue will be noticed and fixed. Rails, Django or any framework in general always have security issues at some time. The issue of WordPress is come from the easy to use. The ability to install plugin require write permission from the user that run WordPress. Second, many WordPress plugin expose executable-php file in plugin folder that is invokeable via hitting directly that url. So if Django CMS has that ability, allow downloading 3rd-code and run it, I'm not sure if it's more secure than WordPress. WordPress is just as secure as any Rails or Django app. Bug happens, people fix.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
est 10y ago
> Rails, Django or any framework in general always have security issues at some time. No. Rails & Django have vast smaller attack surface than PHP's default.
- lima 10y ago
  Also, when was the last time you could compromise a Django install or even get remote code execution?
DanieleProcida 10y ago
It's ironic that what's behind WordPress's fabled ease-of-deployment (i.e. allowing third-party code to be downloaded an executed) is also what's behind many of its security weaknesses. Doing that is pretty much impossible in Django.
acoard 10y ago
Shopify's EmbeddedSDK does plugins (or "apps") very securely, but it comes at a development price. Instead of getting write access and running code on the server directly, you basically interact with an API via an embedded web page. Basically an Iframe. The API is more secure than getting to execute arbitrary code; but it is more restricting as a developer. Not perfect, but much better.

oliwarner 10y ago

Installation isn't even half the battle. Updates are the killer thing in the Python world that even seasoned Django devs (raises hand) get wrong every so often. Sure, you can `pip install -Ur requirements.txt` but will it work? Do I need to set up continuous integration? Testing servers? What happens when there are backwards incompatibilities between elements? As things are you need a Django dev on staff to run a Django website. There is no dev-deploy-dump process that Wordpress "designers" get to enjoy. It's constant. To really compete, Django (not just Django CMS, IMO) needs environment monitoring, testing and upgrading baked in. Many will argue that it's not its job —and they aren't wrong— but nobody else seems to be willing to do this in a way that anything but a seasoned programmer capable of running.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

Can I use Aldryn on Linode? Does it come up with full email installed? Today you can go to GoDaddy, rent a VPS relatively cheap, fire-up a Wordpress install and be up and running with a website and full email service for a small business inside of one hour. Attempting to achieve the same with Phython/Django/Django-CMS on something like a Linode is an exercise of frustration. I love Python/Django yet, more often than not, I have no choice but to point people towards Wordpress. ...and then there's the Python 2.x/3.x mess...

neokya 10y ago

I really want Aldryn to succeed. I have tried to test it out, and my major issue is documentation and not so clear UI. For example, it's not clear to me how can I clone project I created on Aldryn and work on local. It's been about 10 minutes I am clicking around, still can't figure it out. Do I have to use Mac app? Can I work on as usual Django project on command line and just do git push when ready? Even docs here isn't clear to me http://support.divio.com/hc/en-us/categories/200815715-Local-development http://support.divio.com/hc/en-us/categories/200815715-Local... Btw, that django cms demo with Aldryn boilerplate is kick ass. Edit: After lots of clicking, I found how to install aldryn client. pip install aldryn-client

DanieleProcida 10y ago
If you're having any trouble getting to grips with it, don't hesitate to drop us a line - on our live help system if you wish: https://www.divio.com/en/#intercom https://www.divio.com/en/#intercom Otherwise, both https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-website-without-knowing-python-django-part-one/ https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit... and the Guided Tour https://www.divio.com/en/academy/aldryn-cloud-django-cms-guided-tour/ https://www.divio.com/en/academy/aldryn-cloud-django-cms-gui... will help.

brianmurphy 10y ago

Vanilla WordPress may be the wrong target when trying to design for ease of use. Page builders have superseded the TinyMCE "visual" page/post editor. Beaverbuilder is the most talked about modern page builder at the WordPress meetups I attend. Try to build a homepage layout like airbnb.com with your tutorial and again with beaverbuilder. You will find a huge technical difference.

dtougas 10y ago

I am a Python/Django developer. I am not a WordPress fan, but I am not above recommending it to people, provided that they understand what they are getting into. This is what I generally tell people... - WordPress as an 90/10 solution: You can get 90% of what you want for 10% of the effort, and you don't have to be a programmer to get most of the way. It is that last 10% that will suck 90% of your time, and it won't be pretty. In fact, it will probably be terrible and (as a developer) you will feel very icky about yourself when it is done. If you can be satisfied with getting close-to-but-not-quite what you want, then you will probably be happy with WordPress. If you are very particular about that last 10%, then you will probably be in for a world of pain. It may end-up costing just as much (or sometimes even be cheaper) to go with a custom/Django solution in those cases. - WordPress works well as a basic publishing platform. That was what it was designed for, and that is it's sweet spot. It isn't however ideally suited to application development. The further you head down the path of trying to make WordPress behave outside of the standard content publishing paradigm, the more painful and difficult it will become. - You absolutely have to stay on top of security and updates. If you aren't willing to spend that time, then you will end-up paying for all the time you saved when you set things up by having to deal with security fallout. I recognize the appeal and place that WordPress has in the marketplace. I also recognize that people that need it are not my target clients. I have learned that my sweet spot for development is to fill the niche where WordPress isn't a great option.