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Paraphrasing Bruce McKinney on Visual Basic (who was probably paraphrasing someone else): "Django-based CMS systems make the easy easier and the hard impossible

Paraphrasing Bruce McKinney on Visual Basic (who was probably paraphrasing someone else): "Django-based CMS systems make the easy easier and the hard impossible". I worked with Django for about 4 years of my life, maybe more if we consider some proof-of-concept projects. Every single 'framework on top of the framework' (with the exception of Django REST Framework) I've tried has been 'almost perfect', but that little delta between what you have and perfection is impossible to bridge. Just the dependency hell introduced by some of the projects is reason enough to give up. If all you want is a simple CMS with support for some markup and adding images/videos, you can throw that together using Django, the Markdown module and one of the myriad upload plugins in a couple of days. You want to provide RSS? Use the built-in feed system. You'll spend more time reading the documentation and tweaking the settings file than putting the whole thing together yourself.

tomd 13y ago
For a site with a handful of pages and a single author who's happy to use django.contrib.admin I agree with you that plain DIY Django will probably get you there more quickly. But Wagtail (and other Django CMSs) gives you a lot more than that: - a fast, intuitive content authoring experience - preview / submit / moderate / publish workflow - a UI which scales to very large numbers of authors, pages, images - powerful full-text search in the front- and back-ends - strong support for image handling (e.g. animated gifs via Wand) and media embedding (OEmbed or Embedly) As an agency, these points are all pretty much requirements for the sites we build. We couldn't find anything else which gave us these as well as allowing us to build models and templates in plain Django, and we had a client - the Royal College of Art - who agreed to let us open source Wagtail on the back of what we developed for them.
- dguaraglia 13y ago
  Hi! Sorry, I didn't mean my comment to come through as criticism to this particular project. I meant it as a more of a warning to people who might be tempted to use such a complex system for something like running a small few entries in their website. Chances are the effort to integrate it would be bigger than just writing a minimalistic thing in the existing codebase. I agree that systems like these have a place if what you want is something akin to Drupal (but with a nicer codebase.)
mattwestcott 13y ago
On the 'framework on top of the framework' point - one thing we've aimed to do with Wagtail is to preserve Django's approach to models, templates and so on, rather than falling into the 'inner platform' trap and building a totally new system that just happens to use Django under the hood. So, for example, page layout is still done with Django's template system, and new page types are just Django models with some additions. As a result, using Wagtail is actually not massively different to the DIY route, at a functional level - but you get the extra bells and whistles like revision tracking and workflow as well.
- andybak 13y ago
  It's a shame you didn't attempt to integrate with the standard admin. That alone makes you slightly 'an island apart' as I now face the challenge of either: a) build my own CRUD for parts of the system that aren't directly related to the CMS (products, crm etc etc) or b) rely on integration with your admin - which I'm guessing isn't as extensible or mature as Django's
  - xaritas 13y ago
    Wagtail's authoring interface and Django's admin coexist. I believe the demo sets up the Wagtail interface at /admin and puts the standard admin at /django-admin. Presumably you can change those in your urls.py to whatever you like.
    - andybak 13y ago
      Two admin interfaces with different appearances and UI conventions isn't a terribly optimal user experience. If Wagtail even attempted to smooth the differences between the two (i.e. a custom skin and some customizations to the default admin to make them more similar) then it might be a bearable compromise.

tomd 13y ago

For a site with a handful of pages and a single author who's happy to use django.contrib.admin I agree with you that plain DIY Django will probably get you there more quickly. But Wagtail (and other Django CMSs) gives you a lot more than that: - a fast, intuitive content authoring experience - preview / submit / moderate / publish workflow - a UI which scales to very large numbers of authors, pages, images - powerful full-text search in the front- and back-ends - strong support for image handling (e.g. animated gifs via Wand) and media embedding (OEmbed or Embedly) As an agency, these points are all pretty much requirements for the sites we build. We couldn't find anything else which gave us these as well as allowing us to build models and templates in plain Django, and we had a client - the Royal College of Art - who agreed to let us open source Wagtail on the back of what we developed for them.

dguaraglia 13y ago
Hi! Sorry, I didn't mean my comment to come through as criticism to this particular project. I meant it as a more of a warning to people who might be tempted to use such a complex system for something like running a small few entries in their website. Chances are the effort to integrate it would be bigger than just writing a minimalistic thing in the existing codebase. I agree that systems like these have a place if what you want is something akin to Drupal (but with a nicer codebase.)

mattwestcott 13y ago

On the 'framework on top of the framework' point - one thing we've aimed to do with Wagtail is to preserve Django's approach to models, templates and so on, rather than falling into the 'inner platform' trap and building a totally new system that just happens to use Django under the hood. So, for example, page layout is still done with Django's template system, and new page types are just Django models with some additions. As a result, using Wagtail is actually not massively different to the DIY route, at a functional level - but you get the extra bells and whistles like revision tracking and workflow as well.

andybak 13y ago
It's a shame you didn't attempt to integrate with the standard admin. That alone makes you slightly 'an island apart' as I now face the challenge of either: a) build my own CRUD for parts of the system that aren't directly related to the CMS (products, crm etc etc) or b) rely on integration with your admin - which I'm guessing isn't as extensible or mature as Django's
- xaritas 13y ago
  Wagtail's authoring interface and Django's admin coexist. I believe the demo sets up the Wagtail interface at /admin and puts the standard admin at /django-admin. Presumably you can change those in your urls.py to whatever you like.
  - andybak 13y ago
    Two admin interfaces with different appearances and UI conventions isn't a terribly optimal user experience. If Wagtail even attempted to smooth the differences between the two (i.e. a custom skin and some customizations to the default admin to make them more similar) then it might be a bearable compromise.