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Comment by currysausage | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but since CMS-related submissions come up rather scarcely nowadays: What are some promising, modern Web Content Management Systems for medium-sized sites that I should look at, especially if I like the clean, modular design of ProcessWire very much, but not its implementation (too slow even with caching enabled)?

I don't care about the programming language (PHP is fine, so is anything else). What I do care about is flexibility in terms of custom page types (e.g. define "Author", "Title", "Description", "ISBN", and "Cover Image" fields for page type "Book"; loop through such child items on the parent page).

Is Django CMS something that might make me happy? Are there any new projects on the horizon that look promising?

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django CMS is a lot smarter than that.

It's really a kludge to define 'page types' for (say) a book - a book is a book, not a page.

So in Django you define a book, in a modular application, and then define how it's displayed or represented, which of course could include having its own page - but also allows you to connect it to all kinds of other meaningful data.

django CMS is designed to allow you to integrate such modular applications. The tutorial http://docs.django-cms.org/en/develop/introduction/index.htm... covers this, in the section "Integrating a third-party application".

Drupal 8 just dropped a couple weeks ago and will do everything you just listed out of the box. The code under the hood appears to be vastly more pleasant and interesting to work with than any other PHP CMS I know of, including previous versions of Drupal.

Indeed, Drupal 8 is first and foremost a data modeling tool. It's for structured content, not pages.

It allows you to reuse that structured content in many ways, everywhere.

(Django CMS as demonstrated in the video is purely about building pages, which makes it — if I'm being a bit harsh — just a glorified MS FrontPage.)

I've just gotten my first exposure to actually writing D8 code in the last few days. IMHO, you're allowed and thank you SO MUCH for this release.

I've been one of the skeptics on how big a change this was going to be for years, but now having looked at the delivered product I'm really impressed and really excited to move some old projects into it.

Very glad to hear that :)

That video's just about the interface.

Even the demo http://demo.django-cms.org (good luck getting in at the moment, though) shows how django CMS can reuse structured data from multiple applications that also integrate with its editing and publishing tools (in the demo, news, people, events, jobs, etc).

There are biomedical labs for example that use django CMS to publish information automatically. Obviously django CMS itself knows nothing about biomedical data, but it provides the tools that make it very easy to integrate those applications (which thanks to Django are themselves very quick and easy to build).

Another example: https://developer.ubuntu.com/api/scopes/cpp/current/ is part of a django CMS site - and I can assure you that that API documentation is not coming out of a FrontPage-like page builder!

Then why doesn't the interface reflect the building blocks of the structured content?

Where the video says "The Django CMS interface", the interface is clearly page-centric, not structured content-centric. It has building blocks like "feature-visual", "bg-home.jpg", "feature-content", "container", "row", "column col-md-24" etc.

How is that structured content?

Perhaps it can do structured content, but then why doesn't the video put that front and center? Is this perhaps an "also" feature, for building landing pages? Then why does the marketing talk about "content editors"?

So perhaps it's just the marketing that oversimplifies things? :)

I suggest you at least try the demo, rather than trying to make a series of wild guesses from screenshots in an 80 second video!

Why am I being downvoted?

Probably because your comment is incorrect. Django-CMS is almost exclusively structured content, and since it's essentially an extension of Django, you can use standard django models within the CMS.

If you want more of a page based CMS, check out wagtail. Also pretty awesome, although in very different ways.

Well, the video indisputably shows the opposite. It's quite ridiculous to claim an improved UX and then show the UX that is apparently an edge case.

To then downvote, that's just sad.

Not sure who down-voted you. In your defense you did qualify your statement with "...as demonstrated in the video...". I suspect the DV'er thought you made a lot of bold assumptions though, based on that one, single video?

Wordpress + the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin can do this pretty easily for even a non-technical user. Although doing detailed code customization on the backend is a bit of a mess.

If you want a lot of logic / custom code, I'd use django-cms!

Along with ACF, a must-have wordpress plugin is Timber: https://github.com/jarednova/timber/wiki

Basically gives you views and controllers, you fetch posts in php files, manipulate them, then render out twig views.

You can even add custom routes: https://github.com/jarednova/timber/wiki/Routes. If I want to decouple WP and the frontend, I just add routes that return JSON, same as Express or any other modern framework.

That's pretty slick - thanks for sharing! Going to have to try using that on the next project.

As much as I like the idea behind Timber, I'd not recommend using it for a production site. It has some current security issues that the devs seem to both not understand AND to not be much concerned with (a frightening combination). Don't want to get too specific, but searching their github issues for reports on the usual suspects (SQL injection, etc) should show you all you need you know.

With the coming of WordPress REST, I'm hopeful that a group more secure minded starts working on WP templates.

On PHP I quite like Concrete5. It's reasonably clean, and while I've only used it on small sites there are a bunch of people using it as their main CMS for decent sized sites.

The CMS I use the most is Umbraco. It's an open-source ASP.NET CMS that I've used on a varied range of sites, from small to very large. It has its flaws, like most of these types of tools, but I recommend downloading it, and giving it a quick test.

I'll second the Concrete5 recommendation. It's MVC under the covers, a common sense architecture, highly customizable, an exceptional UI for content editors, and a good community. For content editors, we do a one hour boot camp and that is sufficient to bring anyone non-technical up to speed.

I love concrete5, we get lots of business from frustrated users willing to switch to anything and everything else. :-)

I would put the recently released Plone 5 on your list of CMS's to review. Major updates in Plone 5:

* completely new user interface for content managers * updated accessibility, mobilized themes, etc * content types can now be created via the web using the Dexterity. * the Diazo theming system makes customizing the look of Plone real easy via the web * Deco allows you to customize the layout of pages via the web. While Deco is still an add-on, it is ready for production use, and will be included by default in Plone in the future.

While Dexterity, Diazo and Deco all can be used via the web, you can export anything created via the web to the file system. If desired this allows you to quickly prototype work with the active involvement of content managers and designers, then bring the project under file system version control and add more advanced features via programming.

None of these technologies are new. The plone community has been working on them for much of the last 5 years, and they were available as options or add-ons to Plone 4. But the level of polish achieved, and the knowledge that these tools are standard makes Plone 5 a major improvement.

I had built many sites with Plone 3 & 4. I liked Plone, but it could be difficult to learn to program. I spent much of the last four years away from active Plone development. I am very excited by the new features of Plone 5, it is much easier to program.

I would strongly advocate against using Plone ( 1 year of experience ). Slow, inflexible, data goes into a database which nobody uses and is not a database by any stretch of imagination. Effectively you are now locked in.

Even for a moderate site you would need a caching proxy in front. Code is not pythonic at all, but a java-esq class hierarchy over 15 levels deep.

Very small user base, little online help.

Will never touch again.

Two CMS's that are very good in this regard, but not open source (and not free) are:

* [Craft CMS](https://craftcms.com/)

* [Perch Runway](https://grabaperch.com/products/runway)

Both are $200~300 per site, and like ProcessWire they are completely markup-agnostic and give you total flexibility to define your fields however you like.

Take a look at Wagtail.io . It's newish but seems to be getting a good amount of traction by some pretty interesting customers. Written in Python/Django FWIW.

I had forgotten about Wagtail.io. I had a look a while ago and it was still pretty new; looks interesting at first sight. Have you worked with it?

I haven't but I'm planning a new site and I'm going to give it a go. I have a site with entities rather than just pages, so the content model seems to fit. I used Django-CMS about 4 years ago and it didn't support the people editing the site in terms of UX. So I ditched it and went with Wordpress (which I'm not happy with, hence wanting to change).

I used to work for Torchbox who are developing Wagtail, so I heard about it before it went public. But looking at the uptake on http://madewithwagtail.org/ it seems to be doing very well in the market.

Wagtail isn't so new now - it's coming up to two years since we launched the open source project and there are now thousands of sites in productions, with high profile users including NASA, Google, NBC, the US and UK governments. Wagtail takes quite a different approach to Django CMS and we're very happy to see their continued progress. Congratulations on the release!

Sorry, I realize I can research this myself—and plan to—but do you happen to have any references where I might learn about the differences in approach between Wagtail and Django CMS?

Thanks in advance!

Here's a video in which Tom Dyson (Wagtail) and Iacopo Spalletti (django CMS) discuss this question at DjangoCon Europe 2015: https://vimeo.com/135039952

> Take a look at Wagtail.io

Good grief. Thin white and black text on a red background. Why do you hate my eyes? Why??

Grav released their 1.0 beta few weeks ago. It looks pretty promising. Seems it was created by a group that makes themes for WordPress and it borrows some of WordPress's admin ideas.

File-file CMS so it'll make it really easy to make small sites for clients and then deploy them to a EC2 bucket or their shared-host.

http://getgrav.org/

If you don't mind commercial, we are about to release [0], its our internal CMS we've been using for ~4 years, we're just working on some better documentation before release. There's a beta signup on that page which we'll be running for a couple of months.

[0] https://www.lexascms.com/

Looks beautifully promising, will definitely look into it!

The beta signup works but yields 404s [1], you might want to look into that.

[1] https://www.lexascms.com/thank-you/

From 15 years' experience, here's some questions to ask yourself:

Do you want well-written code and an extensible CMS, or do you want a great experience for non-technical users?

Is the usage going to be simple, or do you need workflows and approval systems?

Will the site always be in one language?

Do you want smart image cropping built in (& handling responsive imagery), will you use an external service or what?

I've used half a dozen in anger and I'm fascinated by what makes a good CMS for an organisation. I spent years looking for perfection; I'm now happy to work with any CMS. Once the core requirements are satisfied, my top tip is to look for something that's got decent support, and check there's always an upgrade path to future versions.

If anyone else likes to chew over what makes a good CMS, contact details are in my profile.

Have a look at Odoo website builder and eCommerce:

* https://www.odoo.com/page/e-commerce

* https://www.odoo.com/page/website-builder

It is very flexible to build dynamic pages and you can build pages like you want without development. (but you will have to modify the HTML/QWeb template)

I just set up something small-ish using Textpattern, which I hadn't touched in years (but used to do larger sites with before I found Django).

Turns out it's still quite nice and quite easily hackable (plus there's still a strong community of people developing and maintaining plugins and other add-ons for it), though not so heavy on the WYSIWYG features people seem to think are synonymous with a CMS.

My suggestion is drupal, CMS with drupal is a good choice.

yes there are multiple CMS choices and I tried a few of them, nothing beats Drupal due to its modular design, wide community, open source, various plugins, security updates,etc.

Sorry, I feel qualified to disagree here since I used to use Drupal (v6 and v7) for all my company's projects. That is, until the day I discovered django CMS. Then, I literally never looked back. Building out projects is probably 3-4X faster using django CMS and it is so much easier to scale the resulting site using the power of Django.

There is only one thing I miss from Drupal, and that is the ability to create new "content types" on-the-fly. But here lies it weakness too. The resulting DB structure that allows this is relatively complicated which means that any custom development you do outside of the normal Drupal stuff is also more complicated than it has to be. This also has a direct performance impact.

With Django (and by extension, django CMS), the structure of the database is as clean or complicated as you require, and, there's nifty tools for migrating the schema and/or data as you evolve your project. Its beautiful, really.

MODX, started building with it about a year ago and haven't looked back.

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