django-cms versus textpattern - django

I am at present building a medium-sized educational website containing text, academic articles, blog, audio book excerpts, mathematical demos, etc., using custom CSS styles. I am leaning toward two ready-made solutions:
django-cms; and
textpattern.
I have ruled out WordPress because customization is not so easy. Joomla is overkill for this website and the table based design it uses is against my philosophy.
Because I have a number of years of experience in django, django-cms seems to be the natural way to go, but textpattern has more out-of-the-box features and is well supported.
What are the pros and cons between django-cms and textpattern based on prior experience of the people on this list?
Many thanks.

For a comparison of CMSes the best site I have found so far is:
http://cmsmatrix.org/matrix
Over 1200 CMSes are listed and you can compare CMSes by clicking on the checkboxes provided this helped me make my decision and ended up turning back to one of the popular CMSes namely WordPress.

Because I have a number of years of experience in django, django-cms seems to be the natural way to go, but textpattern has more out-of-the-box features and is well supported.
django-cms also has a lot of features from plugins and are well supported too.
django-cms is a fine software which even has it's own hosting site. If as you seem to suggest, the only reason you are looking at textpattern is because it has many out-of-the-box features, then you should really go the natural way with django-cms.

I'm a fan of Textpattern and have been using it for years now. It's benefits are its simplicity and light-weight making it perform well. However, these might be an issue for you if you are wanting to build different content types. Textpattern's interface treats all article content as the same (unless you start install a load of plugins to tweak this). This is fine if your site is primarily for articles, but from what you've said in your question I suspect not.
It is really simple to download and install; so I'd recommend giving it a quick look to see what it can do for you.

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CMS+blog+e-commerce: django or web2py [closed]

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At the moment we are running few smaller PHP sites (small company, private, non-profit org, friends...) and would like to migrate them to Python in order to be able to tweak them more easily and/or extend their functionality due to being familiar with Python although without real experience using some of the Python frameworks.
In order not to write everything from the scratch, we'd need decent CMS, blog and some e-commerce module.
We did some research, installed and tried few apps in Django world and so far have arrived to the two possibilities:
Django-CMS as CMS, Zinnia as blog engine and Django shop as e-commerce or
Mezzanine which integrates CMS+blog and Cartridge as shopping cart application.
Both combinations are nice, although not perfect...At the moment there is problem integrating released versions of django-cms & zinnia due to their usage of non-compatible versions of django-mptt or e.g. Mezzanine is missing some features like linkback support in blog etc.
While playing with the above two sets of apps, we heard about Web2py and must say that we like lot of things there...
We are aware it's younger project with smaller community, less apps etc., but wonder if there is some set of web2py applications which can compare with the two above-mentioned Django sets so that we can choose to start with Web2py, learn it and in that process replace PHP sites with it?
So, we would like to have some capable CMS+blog with the following features:
tag cloud, categories
spam protection
RSS feeds
multiple authors
threaded comments (optional)
linkback (pingback/trackback) support
(easily) theme-able
markdown/reST markup for writing content/posting
multi-lingual support
As far as e-commerce is concerned, besides easy integration with CMS+blog apps we do not need anything spectacular - our 'company' is selling 'services', so no need for thousands of products (only 10s of them), no complicated shipping options so something like:
multi-lingual support
basic infrastructure for payment methods (e.g.) PayPal and we would need to write a custom module for form-based API
simple shopping cart able to handle simple product descriptions
tax calculations and
(optional) PDF support
would be everything what we would need.
Considering the features we would like to have, our (non)experience working with any framework, which one - Django or Web2py - you consider is more suitable in terms of ease of learning, ease of use, application support etc. ?
I've sent two posts to web2py list and (maybe) because my query was not specific-enough (or some other reason) I did not receive any reply there and I saw there are some apps like KPAX CMS which looks old/non-maintained. Otoh, there is Powerpack which incorporates Instant Press but I'm not sure about availability of e-commerce component. Finally, I've found out about plugin_wiki which seems to be new/young app, but, considering we found* out about possibilities in Django-world, we would like to learn about the situation on the Web2py scene in order to be able to evaluate both options better.
p.s. it would be nice if Appliances list would be organized a bit better so that it's easy to find out what is maintained, where is project page etc.
I've had a lot of success with Django-CMS. It's very, very easy to write custom content-type plugins, extend menu nodes with custom nav elements, such as a list of product categories, etc. It's dead-simple to hook custom application code to any page in the navigation hierarchy.
As you mentioned in your question, Zinnia also plugs into Django-CMS for a nice blogging solution that is also extensible. Adding a cart app, whether it's from the DIVIO team or not should be an easy task.
Django, DjangoCMS and Python in general, have very low learning curves in my opinion. In 14 years of development, Django is the only web framework that hasn't gotten in my way, and Python is an absolute pleasure to work with on a daily basis.
I think you'll find that the Django ecosystem is much more holistic than any of the other Python frameworks, it's also very, very well documented and there are literally hundreds of 3rd party apps. Plus, Django admin can potentially save you many weeks of dev time, and you can override, skin and extend it to do just about anything.
My $0.02 :)
-- EDIT --+
Yeah, right after I posted I realized I was heavy on comparison of frameworks but light on suggested solutions to your problem (i.e. existing appliances). I think that Django probably has more matured addins/apps. That being said, crafting your own blog in web2py (a simple blog) is probably only a little harder than configuring one for another framework.
There is the wordpressclone appliance: http://web2py.com/appliances/default/show/36
(you can extract existing wordpress data and get it in here, i'm pretty sure there's a WP export and an import function on this appliance)
There is an e-store (haven't used it): http://web2py.com/appliances/default/show/24
There is KPax CMS, as you said, but i think this one might be out of date, unless it was updated recently. The integration between these should be possible, you can share sessions across apps and I think if you have the same auth_user db, it should work.
I would try installing these and see if they are close to meeting your needs -- especially KPax since I'm not sure the state it's in.
-- END EDIT --
Both Django and Web2py are very good frameworks in my opinion. I think you would be happy with either. That being said, having not used frameworks I would say to with web2py, unless you NEED certain modules that only exist in the django world. Web2py probably has a little more gradual learning curve. Also, it can do RSS out of the box, there's a screencast somewhere showing how to create a blog app in about 5 minutes (including comments), and the community is (usually) very responsive. I don't think there is anything that web2py can do that django can't (except DB migrations -- but i think you can make django do them with some 3rd party code), or vice versa.
Django favors a "explicit is better than implicit" development methodology, which requires to you import various modules and doesn't have all the "magic" of web2py. Using django, you will be more aware of exactly what is going on under the hood. The django templating language is easy to learn and provides a lot of functionality for common markup tasks. Their is a LOT of documentation, a larger user-base and tons of 3rd party modules/plugins/whatever.
Web2py favors a "everything should have a default" approach, and enables to to focus on the big picture without getting bogged down by the minutia of web development. I'm not saying this is in contrast to django, but rather that web2py is very strong on this point. It allows you to rapidly develop applications, and takes the headache out of things like updating a table schema (i.e. it does database migrations). I also prefer web2py's templating language to django's, as it allows pure python and does not require one to learn a separate templating language at all.
I think both frameworks have decent internationalization/localization features. I'm not sure if Django's is still under development or not? Web2py's is easy to use, but I think you might have to provide a lot of the translations yourself.
As for the lack of replies on the web2py list, maybe it's because this topic is becoming more and more frequent? I'm not sure. You could ask people on the web2py freenode channel.
Also, definitely check out this link:
Django vs web2py for a beginner developer
The first response is from the lead developer of web2py, but I think he makes a fairly balanced comparison.
Also, the previous thread includes a link to here (the good and bad of web2py):
http://www.mengu.net/post/django-vs-web2py
web2py is a great framework, but currently light on reusable CMS, blog, and particularly e-commerce applications. It sounds like you have already stumbled upon the main options -- plugin_wiki, Powerpack, and Instant Press.
I don't think there is a mature and currently maintained e-commerce application, but you may be able to make use of web2py-estore. There are also some options for accepting credit card payments (see also).
plugin_wiki includes comment functionality, and there is also plugin_comments. For PDFs, pyfpdf comes with web2py, and there is also web2py_appreport. web2py also includes RSS support.
EDIT: Also, another web2py CMS under development, to be released soon: SimplrCMS

What web-CMS website language do you recommend?

I am a novice web designer who has a history of creating websites using templates and WSIWYG programs like Dreamweaver. So I know some basic html and a little flash. But that's it - I DO NOT know CSS or CMS. Mostly I'm a graphic designer. But I'm looking to learn a new web language...
I now have a client who wants me to design a website so that in the future, they can edit the website themselves. I know this is a popular trend these days in the client community. And I know this is the main purpose of web CMS. I am looking to learn a new web language but want to make sure I learn the right one.
My question is, what language do you recommend to build this website -- making it the easiest for the client to edit in the future? What language has the best/easiest interface for a NON-DESIGNER to edit a website? Another matter of note, also, is the flexibility of design creativity on my end.
Wordpress? Droopal? Joomla? I've researched a little bit about Adobe Contribute CS5 as well and thought of this also as a viable option... perhaps?
Thoughts? Suggestions?
In depth info would be awesome! Pros/cons of popular languages, common uses for popular languages (blogs, ecommerce, etc.), links to further knowledge, references, etc.
Thanks!!
Without a doubt, you should start with Wordpress.
You may take a look at this google trends comparison: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=wordpress,drupal,joomla
I'm not saying is the best, but Wordpress is VERY popular, it is much simpler to begin with, and I think you'll get much more job offers.
Regarding languages and technologies, Wordpress is PHP powered, so your learning path should be:
- HTML
- CSS
- PHP
- JavaScript / jQuery
And for the future, you might start thinking on Javascript, Node, Angular and React since the internet ship is going that direction (even Wordpress)
My personal recommendation if you wanted to code fancy things would be Python and the Django web framework. However, that's probably a bit more advanced than you can currently handle.
All 3 of the frameworks you've listed are well respected. Which one you choose is really going to depend on what kind of site you're building. If you're building a site which focuses around a blog, by all means use Wordpress. You can add static elements relatively easily, but it shines for episodic content. If you're building a site that has more static "page" type content, either Drupal or Joomla are reasonable choices. I would probably lean a bit towards Drupal. If you tell us what kind of page you're building for your client, we can give you more tailored advice.
As an aside, "CMS" isn't really a language. The systems you're talking about are frameworks. PHP is the language that they happen to be written in.
You won't go wrong with any of the above options.
I would stay away from Adobe Contribute.
There are many good open source content systems such as wordpress, drupal, joomla, etc. They can be customized for your needs. Here are some tips if you want to write your own: learn soke script language like php, perl, python,etc. Php is very user-friendly and there are so much built in functions that make your life easier. You also need some database experience - mysql, postgre, etc. Creating your own cms is a good way to learn a concept, so good luck.
I would definitely start with learning HTML 4 (and 5) and CSS.
For a server side language there are several options. Perhaps PHP is the easiest to start with.
WordPress is a very powerful framework. Joomla is even bigger. It totally depends on the requirements. But if you want to use a framework like Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress, PHP is probably the best language to study. Personally I'd prefer ASP.NET, but that's mostly because I'm already familiar with that framework. I like PHP as well, but it always feels like ASP.NET is more mature. But that's my personal opinion!
Take a look at the features of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, that's the best advice I can give. You've got the requirements for the website so, after a short study, you are the only one who can make a good decision.

Is there a self-hosted google-sites like solution?

I am looking for a wiki type software to keep something like a wiki/knowledge base at my university. I tried MediaWiki (with FCKeditor), DokuWiki and MoinMoin, but they seem too hard to use for an average user - at least not without some trouble.
I found Google Sites to be almost ideal for my purpose, but as I mentioned the wiki is to be used at my university, there will be a strong demand to host it on our servers.
Do you know any software similar to what Google Sites offers? What I really want is a WYSIWYG editor and a hierarchical menu structure - without cryptic "categories" or lots of colons or brackets.
Actually, providing some hacking every CMS (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpres...) could help you.
You (the developer) just have to build the site (design, use cases, deployment...etc) according to your (University) needs: simple & intuituve UI, simple tasks..etc

CMS or template system for one-person micro-ISV?

Not a programming question I'm afraid, so moderators do what you will, but it is a question specifically for self-employed programmers running their own ISV sites.
If you publish your own shareware or freeware, do you use any CMS or templating system to streamline maintaining the website? Would you recommend any?
Two most important features I'm looking for that I couldn't find in any popular CMS/blogging engine, from my favorite TextPattern to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are:
a templating system to maintain structural consistency of xhtml page layout
a hash table of user-defined values that works with the templates to substitute these values for identifiers.
Explanation: If you publish more than one application, the site probably contains several classes of pages that are nearly identical for each product: "Features", "Screenshots", "What's new", "Download", etc. These pages have the same layout and differ mainly in product-specific data. I'd like to be able to define "CurrentVersion=2.2" for product A, and "CurrentVersion=3.3" for product B in a "dictionary", and have the system generate two "Download" pages from the same template, replacing the "CurrentVersion" identifier with each product's respective value.
Other than that, I am looking for good support for static pages (the example pages above do not yield themselves to blog-like timeline treatment) and for design templates (themes), since I can't do graphic design at all (no skills, no tools, no talent). A good search function, esp. for the FAQs, is important. Another nice-to-have is easy (preferably wiki-like) way of linking to pages within the site. Some CMS-es, such as Joomla, make this simple and common task surprisingly inconvenient.
LAMP, and preferably free, since mine is a freeware-only shop.
I need no collaboration features and no multi-user content editing at all. My ISP doesn't support Zope, so that excludes some candidates.
I'm asking this question having spent months trying to find a solution that would help me leave static html behind and reduce the maintenance chores, such as updating the current version number on several pages manually. So what do others use to publish their software?
(Please do not reply by just saying "Try X". At least please say what makes it suitable or how it is better than other possible solutions. I've already tried a number of CMS engines, and they all seem to require extensive modifications to suit this particular need. Since my programming experience is strictly desktop-side Windows, tweaking these products is well beyond my skills (and my skin crawls to think of potential security WTFs I could unwittingly commit). Time is also a factor, since between my day job and my late-night coding, there's little left for learning how to write my own CMS from scratch - just typing static html would be more efficient.)
Wordpress is quite nice. It has a big community behind it so you can leech some plugins, like for SEO optimization, PayPal integration, Google Analytics statistics tracking, etc. And you also have a full-featured administration backend to manage all your content.
I would recommend Joomla 3.2.x. I have the same sort of project based websites, and this provides the flexibility for all of the different requirements. While WordPress is great the simplicity of it gets the better of it, Joomla is far more flexible and has a huge support network and extensions library.

Need help choosing a framework for bilingual site

First, some background information... I'm coming up on a medium-scale website for a non-profit that will require both English and Korean translations. Feature-set includes: CMS for normal content, a blog, some form submission/handling (including CSV/PDF exports), a job posting board, a directory of related businesses and non-profits (that accepts visitor submissions), and a basic (probably blog-driven) newsroom.
I have a fairly strong development background, and I've done some sites using Drupal, built some basic custom CMSes using frameworks like CodeIgniter, and I've recently started getting into Django. These are the primary options that I am exploring, and I would consider using different tools for different portions of the project, but what I'm mainly interested in, is if anyone has any experience to share with regards to localization/internationalization. I haven't yet put together a site that supports multiple languages, so before I get in trouble by underestimating the task, or making poor assumptions, I'd like to get some input to help guide my decision-making process.
Do you have any recommendations for frameworks (Drupal, Django, CodeIgniter) that handle localization/internationalization/translation well for a CMS? I know they all support it, but I'm looking for real-world experience here (or suggestions for modules/plugins given explanations).
Sorry for the longwinded question, but I wanted to be clear as possible. Thanks in advance!
There is a distinction between "site" translation and content translation. Django handles the site translation great, out of the box. The content translation, however, requires making some decisions (there's no one right way at this point). This probably makes sense, because of the very nature of Django as a lower level framework (when compared to something like Drupal, which is intended to serve as a complete CMS).
There are applications for Django which are meant to add this functionality (in the form of translations configured at the model level):
Django-multilingual
Transmeta
Also, I found this question that is related.
The bottom line though, is that this is still being explored in the Django world, and neither approach has been decided upon for the framework. Also, although I haven't used it, Drupal has module support for this in the form of the i18n module.
I will update with more conclusions as I come to them. If you have anything to add about content translation in Django or in Drupal, feel free to add your own answer as well.
You probably already know that the native i18n support in django is quite good. As for translation, you might try the django-rosetta app which allows you to grant translation rights to a subset of users, who are then able to translate through an admin-like interface.
Zend_Translate is pretty comprehensive. And if you decide to use PHP, I suggest you take a look at it. It provides multiple interfaces (e.g. an Array, CSV, Gettext, etc.) to manage your translations, which makes it IMHO unmatched when it comes to PHP.
I'm not sure how well it plays with Drupal, since Drupal is hardly a framework but more a CMS -- or maybe a CMS framework. I'm pretty sure that Drupal either has a thing build in or that there is a plugin for it.
With CodeIgniter you would start from scratch and Zend_Translate plays well with it.
I liked Drupal over Joomla. You should also look into DotNetNuke, out of the box it has lot of things that will meet your needs.
Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!