I'm helping build a multilingual website in English, Chinese and French (after in Spanish, Korean and Arabic). I've collected a database of over 2000+ entries. It is essentially a huge product catalog (specifically travel packages) where more or less the info is the same (prices, sizes, numbers, etc.) but the labels change (of course excluding certain intro texts that must be written manually). I want to avoid having to translate piece by piece manually.
There needs to be a way for users to save the things they are interested in and rate their favorites. Also, I need an e-commerce shopping cart. Search functionality is a must since people tend to start general (one or two categories or wants) and work towards specifics. Another need is to localization and internationalization. The other need is a specific workflow system so as content is updated and new additions are made, editors can be notified and translators can translate what needs to be done. Work flow is key since the project will involve dozens of non-technical people from around the world.
I originally tried to a work-around solution in Drupal but it seemed ill-equipped and clunky. I tried a self-built PHP CMS but the project seems to big for purely manual. I'm considering Plone and Django, but I don't have any experience working in Python, only PHP. I'm open to trying a new CMS if it meets my needs of internationalization, translation work flow, search functionality and on-going user experience.
Any suggestions on the best CMS for all this?
Plone would be a good solution for the CMS, workflow, search and multilingual.
Ecommerce is not Plone's strength though. I would recommend integrating Plone with something like Satchmo than doing the ecommerce in Plone itself. (This has been done with success in other deployements)
If you are looking at a Django solution to these problems you might consider Satchmo or Lightning Fast Shop for the e-commerce part and Pootle for the translation process...
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I have a django application that contains customer and product information. It is simple but gets the job done. My customer wants the capability to send form letters and news letters and create them from within my app. From a text editing perspective, I understand how simple form letters work by replacing certain blocks of text with queries from the database. But my customer wants fliers with complex graphics and column-based layouts. There are some very mature products out there that I can't come close (nor want to) compete with. He talked about building and editing these pages from within my app. This seems a bridge too far but I don't know if its even possible to build that into a django app.
I have no idea how to approach this and it seems very complicated. But, before say no, I want to explore the available technology and level of effort entailed. Are there open source packages that can help? How could one integrate this capability into a django-based web application? and how hard is it? For a part-time intermediate developer how long would it take?
I'd farm the layout off to something like TeX Live. From there you can generate a PDF and attach it to an email message. Don't let "... a popular means by which to typeset complex mathematical formulae" throw you, TeX is useful for more than that.
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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
I am a computer programmer by training but have been away from web development for a while. I am doing a little bit of background research on various Python web development frameworks. I understand that Django, Grok / Zope 3, and Pylons are all good solid frameworks, but have little in the way of background working with them. Can someone explain to me the difference in approach of the each of the frameworks, and where one shines when compared to the others?
My specific use case is in building a web application that will recommend products to users based on a variety of user supplied information. Thus, it will take a fair bit of user input in the shape of a basic profile, product preferences, attempt to establish social relationships between users. It will also need to support staff uploading products into the system with labeled features that can be then matched to users.
On the last point, would parts of Plone help with providing an interface for non-tech people to upload products and descriptions of the products? Are piece of Plone easy to borrow? Seems like I shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of having a way for people to upload items for sale / recommendation along with some metadata to describe the items. Thanks for the help.
Based on your background and requirements, I'd advise you to go with something like http://pinaxproject.com/ which is based on Django.
Pyramid (the successor to Pylons) is a very low-level framework and you need to either choose the libraries or write all your application code yourself. For someone experienced this makes sense and gives you full control over your code. But it is a bit of a hurdle if you start from scratch and aren't familiar with the available libraries.
Django and Grok are both high level frameworks, with Django being the more popular choice. If you aren't familiar yet with using object databases or URL traversal, Grok is more time consuming to learn.
Plone is not suited for your use-case. It's a content management system and not a general web framework. Very little of the libraries it uses can be reused in a different context, certainly none of its UI. If you want to provide an engaging user experience with personalized content, Plone isn't for you - that's not what its been build to handle.
Disclaimer: I'm a release manager for Plone and Zope 2 / Zope Toolkit and have used Pyramid but not Django.
Dolmen project is a CMS built on top of Grok. Is very simple, but there are very few that use it. If you go with Grok, you could be able to reuse the GUI.
But As Hanno said, Grok is more time-consuming to learn than Django. Also Django has far more users than Grok.
The advantage of using Grok is that you can profit from Zope Component Architecture almost without writing ZCML and using decorators instead.
With Pyramid/Pylons you get a very simple framework and nothing else. It is a decoupled framework, so you are free to use whatever templating enginge you want (Mako, Genshi, Jinja, Cheetah), you are free to choose sqlalchemy, zodb, mongoDb, etc., and you are also free to choose the url mapping scheme (traversal vs. django-style mapping or a combination of both). You can also use ZCA here if you want. For starters this might become quite confusing or verbose.
Django is a kind of monolithic framework that gives you one way to do stuff. That's why it's easy to learn and a very good option. But, in my experience, you sometimes get to a point where you want to deviate from Django standards and it simply cannot be done without patching a bunch of stuff.
And, as for Zope3, I'd recommend you to download a copy of BlueBream and se how it does for you.
As a Plone user I can say that creating Content Objects in Plone is difficult. There is not much documentation on how to do it and it is complicated. Some recommend using UML and specialized Plone products to make it easier but that introduces yet another dependency.
I mention the problem with content objects because your "products" (not the same as a Plone product) would probably be represented in Plone as a content object which you would need to write yourself.
Plone is best when users and editors are entering and approving text in the form of news articles, press releases, photos etc. When that is the use case there are predefined content objects for such things so one does not need to write them oneself.
--Jonathan Mark
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.
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!!