Django CMS functionality

Question

Hi there,

for some days now, I'm considering whether I should use a CMS-like Django-App for a new web-portal I'm ordered to build. Most parts of the portal will be purely model-driven (like News, small ads, directories etc), but there are several static pages that shall be maintained by editors.

I tested out different systems, like Django-CMS, FeinCMS, PyLucid and some others, but they all have a lot of overload I don't need for the project. What I need basically is to give the editors the opportunity to upload images and attachments, easily place them into a text body, give them some attributes like width/height and enter a text as any markup like textile or markdown (not into a wysiwyg-editor). What I don't want is to tailor the whole project into the structure of a CMS (like using CMS-specific template-tags), since most parts of the portal are designed and structured manually. Is there any application I just did not see? I can't imagine that nobody had the same requirements before.

Answer 1

In your case I would 'mis'use a news/blog engine as an advanced flatpages engine. It may sound weird but in most of these engines you can actually misuse things like permalinks to mimic this and those engines give you full opportunity to mess with images and layouting without having to fall back to full blown cms packages.

Now, for actual engines I can't really help, never actually wrote a site that needed a news feed/blog, but I heard pressroom was good (it also uses photologue instead of messing with photos itself). I can't imagine however there won't be any other alternatives, as django originally was developed to power newssites :p.

Answer 2

Try django-categories, it is a very simple category app which is built on top of django-mptt. It uses some of the admin infrastructure of feinCMS. It is much lighter than other full blown CMS' out there. Or you can try Mingus and build around it. If this what you are doing for a living, then I suggest use smaller apps with your own magic glue. This way you can easily customize site with apps you want. Note, lot of apps you find out there are not optimized for heavy use, so buyer beware! Let me know what you decide on!