4 ms·

We've been looking at several CMS's to use for our upcoming website rewrites. Since our content is quite broad and unique in the way that it links together, we'

We've been looking at several CMS's to use for our upcoming website rewrites. Since our content is quite broad and unique in the way that it links together, we've found that existing solutions doesn't really fit into the usual CMS solutions. Therefore we've been looking at using something which is focused on providing an API to the content. Examples of these: - https://prismic.io/ https://prismic.io/ - https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ - https://github.com/aheinze/cockpit https://github.com/aheinze/cockpit Personally, I believe more CMS solutions needs to provide a powerful API for dealing with storing and retrieving content. What does Wagtail have to offer in this respect?

tomd 12y ago
Several of Wagtail's users are using it just like this - a tool for authoring and managing content, with an API for delivering content to web, mobile and print channels. Here's the API documentation: http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/contrib/api/ http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/contrib/api/
magnetised 12y ago
Bit of a plug but (as the developer of) Spontaneous[0] I can highly recommend it for this kind of use case. It aims to be decoupled, that is the system you edit with is not (necessarily) tied into the system you serve your site to the public with. It does this through a publishing mechanism. This defaults to rendering HTML pages (both static & dynamic ones) but can be extended to output anything you want, either replacing the standard HTML output or in addition to it (I personally have integrated with a pyramid based python app using a db based output, that is effectively "render my content into a db table" but you can do less esoteric things like publish JSON or XML docs if that's your need. It works using content type 'blocks' composed of sets of many fields (of varying types). I like to think of it as a "strongly typed" CMS. [0]: https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous
joshbarr 12y ago
My agency spent a while planning a Node.js API CMS build of our own, as well as evaluating Prismic and Contentful. We needed something we could confidently sell to clients, that was open source, user friendly and easy to extend. It also had to run on our clients' own stacks and meet their audit criteria. Wagtail suits those requirements well. It's worth noting that the Wagtail API module is for GETting content at this point – though I hear a more fully featured read/write API is in the works. Wagtail "is just Django" so it's easy enough to plug in the REST framework and build endpoints on that. I implemented Prismic for a startup recently, and the API is also read-only. It's got some very powerful semantic content markup and versioning stuff, but I found it quite a chore to get more than single nodes out of it. In the end, our content editors didn't like the git-centric "content releases" metaphor, so they moved off to something else. Contentful has the read/write API thing down, good support, very actively developed. Unfortunately it doesn't support tree-based content, preferring flat collections with relations, though trees are something many users are asking for. As we're migrating lots of sites (off a PHP CMS) that have well-tested trees, we couldn't quite go that far just yet. tl;dr? No solution is perfect, but Wagtail is making us happy devs, and the community is very friendly. Good luck with your CMS hunt!

tomd 12y ago

Several of Wagtail's users are using it just like this - a tool for authoring and managing content, with an API for delivering content to web, mobile and print channels. Here's the API documentation: http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/contrib/api/ http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/contrib/api/

magnetised 12y ago

Bit of a plug but (as the developer of) Spontaneous[0] I can highly recommend it for this kind of use case. It aims to be decoupled, that is the system you edit with is not (necessarily) tied into the system you serve your site to the public with. It does this through a publishing mechanism. This defaults to rendering HTML pages (both static & dynamic ones) but can be extended to output anything you want, either replacing the standard HTML output or in addition to it (I personally have integrated with a pyramid based python app using a db based output, that is effectively "render my content into a db table" but you can do less esoteric things like publish JSON or XML docs if that's your need. It works using content type 'blocks' composed of sets of many fields (of varying types). I like to think of it as a "strongly typed" CMS. [0]: https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous

joshbarr 12y ago

My agency spent a while planning a Node.js API CMS build of our own, as well as evaluating Prismic and Contentful. We needed something we could confidently sell to clients, that was open source, user friendly and easy to extend. It also had to run on our clients' own stacks and meet their audit criteria. Wagtail suits those requirements well. It's worth noting that the Wagtail API module is for GETting content at this point – though I hear a more fully featured read/write API is in the works. Wagtail "is just Django" so it's easy enough to plug in the REST framework and build endpoints on that. I implemented Prismic for a startup recently, and the API is also read-only. It's got some very powerful semantic content markup and versioning stuff, but I found it quite a chore to get more than single nodes out of it. In the end, our content editors didn't like the git-centric "content releases" metaphor, so they moved off to something else. Contentful has the read/write API thing down, good support, very actively developed. Unfortunately it doesn't support tree-based content, preferring flat collections with relations, though trees are something many users are asking for. As we're migrating lots of sites (off a PHP CMS) that have well-tested trees, we couldn't quite go that far just yet. tl;dr? No solution is perfect, but Wagtail is making us happy devs, and the community is very friendly. Good luck with your CMS hunt!