Comment by lojack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lojack | Hacker News Reader

IMO, you're giving way too much control to the end user with regard to configuring the layout and minute details of their page. Giving a content author control over the padding, background, font choices, etc, is a recipe for them creating super specific pages that look bad and have no consistency.

Typically, I'll limit clients to specific widgets and layouts and train them on how and when to use these elements for maximum effect. That's the only way to maintain design integrity. I don't let them pick fonts, font sizes, colors, etc. Authors are given a list of choices for the fonts, and these choices correspond to the font hierarchy specified early on, and they have to build pages within those bounds.

The idea is you want to give them just enough control to author the content they need (without weird hacks) and nothing more.

I completely agree.

This is also true of rich text editors (at least in their usual default configurations. First thing to do is hide most of the options)

The reason we've developed our own CMS framework (on top of Django) is because everything else I looked at had a complex, powerful and dangerously flexible interface. I lock down almost everything apart from content fields and a choice of page types (about us, contact, product lister etc).

A CMS isn't a design tool or a page layout package. Unless you're building something that's meant to be reusable and configurable by end-users (a mammoth and complex task which you probably want to avoid) then lock down as much as possible. I've had more problems from allowing too much flexibility than i ever get from allowing too little.

> The reason we've developed our own CMS framework (on top of Django)

Is it open source? How does it compare to Mezzanine CMS?

Hey! Relax creator here. You're absolutely right, although Relax stays in between that problem. Each component can have styles, and these styles will come alongside a theme. Which means if the end user is using a theme, he'll just have to drag and drop components, and select the style from the ones the theme has. Makes sense?

We'll also have a templates feature which users can use to not start a page from scratch :-)

isn't that for template authors?

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