What is a good CMS written in Python (and not Plone)?

Question

I've been doing CMS sites for clients using Joomla for a while now, but I've been migrating a lot of my coding over to Python and have been looking for a good CMS solution that's written in Python.

Most of what I've seen so far is either Zope based (Plone) or Django based. I'm not totally opposed to something written in a Python framework such as Django, but I don't want to use Zope (seems to me to have too much "bloat" for something like this).

Is there anything in the Python community like Joomla? I know I could always "roll my own", but I'd rather use something pre-built (if there is such a thing).

Thanks for your time, Seth

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there's really not a lot of mature CMSes out there for Python. Here are a couple of choices though:

• Skeletonz (still in beta)
• PyLucid (haven't actually tried them out, but couldn't get past the constant grammatical and spelling errors) (which are probably because it's made by Germans)
• MoinMoin is very mature, but isn't really made for CMS stuff. With that said, if you spend some time with it, you can mod it to do CMS-like stuff.

So with that said, your best bet may actually be to roll your own in Django or something similar.

Answer 2

The code that runs djangoproject.com is good, but not really released as a package. You can grab the source though, and tweak it for your needs.

Answer 3

I did a similar investigation a while ago, and settled on Plone. It does wrap most of the Zope complexity fairly well, but it continues to seem heavy-weight for what it does. Then again, the functionality offered is fairly substantial, so some trade-off in terms of increased complexity should be expected.

I'd recommend giving Plone a go; the unified installer means you can build and run it up very easily (it includes its own version of Python, stuck as it is on 2.4).

All that said, if I wanted to build another CMS-based site, I'd go with something non-Python, such as Drupal (PHP).

Answer 4

The pinax project is a kind of django bundle with some modules to build community sites. It is a good start to build your cms on it. There is a video available presenting it a djangoconf.

Feature List:

• openid support
• email verification
• password management
• site announcements
• a notification framework
• user-to-user messaging
• friend invitation (both internal and external to the site)
• a basic twitter clone
• oembed support
• gravatar support
• interest groups (called tribes)
• projects with basic task and issue management
• threaded discussions
• wikis with multiple markup support
• blogging
• bookmarks
• tagging
• contact import (from vCard, Google or Yahoo)
• photo management

(from their website)

Answer 5

You know, you can use a different back-end with Plone if you don't like Zope.

http://plone.org/events/conferences/2008-washington-dc/agenda/relational-database-applications-with-plone-and-sqlalchemy/index_html/

Answer 6

Python

zope2 + CMS = plone < Zope3 + CMS = Z3Ext

(http://z3ext.net/)

Answer 7

Considering this now it looks like the two best contenders are Django CMS 2.0 and Fein CMS. Here's Fein. You'll have to find Django CMS 2 yourself, because I can only post one link. =)

http://spinlock.ch/pub/feincms/

They're not as complete as drupal, but in contexts where you want to write code alongside a CMS, they may be a better choice than Drupal.

Answer 8

If you are looking to manage media or podcasts a good python-based CMS solution is MediaCore. It just launched this last week and really looks like a solid content management system. The design is sleek and for organizing, tagging, and managing videos or podcasts it looks like a great solution.

Answer 9

Lighting Fast CMS is a promising new kid on the block.

It is at the moment bit feature crippled, but its development is very active. I'm looking forward on its development.

LFC is Django based.

Answer 10

It might look a bit oldfashioned but you should give ZMS a try:

http://www.zms-publishing.com/